In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
Forgive me, but it seems to me that President Bush is making an ass of himself over North Korea.

Situation A: A state that has been revealed to have a secret nuclear weapons effort, that we believe already has two nuclear weapons, that is still technically at war with a close ally, that has threatened nuclear war if we don't do what they want, that has just expelled international monitors and reopened a nuclear facility that our government said we would destroy unilaterally if it was reopened.

Situation B: A state that we believe to have a secret nuclear weapons effort (but we haven't revealed hard evidence yet), that we do not believe has yet developed nuclear weapons, that is believed to have engaged in terrorist operations against the United States and its allies (but we haven't revealed hard evidence yet), that has just reinvited in international weapons inspectors and against whom we may be obliged (depending on your interpretation of the most recent Security Council resolution) to move against through the U.N. rather than unilaterally.

We're rattling the sabre in against the state in Situation B and declaring that Situation A is resolvable by diplomacy and "economic pressure." This against a state with virtually no economic links with the outside world.

I fear we're going to become a laughingstock. The Administration policy of downplaying the Korea threat is going to seriously undermine its case on Iraq. This is the scenario everyone was worried about when we abandoned the "two war" policy of the first Bush Administration and reduced force levels to the point where we expected only to "win-hold-win" (and that, it seems, is optimistic). This Administration is moving in the direction of being more appeasement-minded that the Clinton Administration, allowing North Korea to openly go nuclear with no consequence whatsoever. And it is revealing to the world that (a) America cannot handle two problems at once; (b) once you have nuclear weapons, America will be decisively deterred from attacking you. We are also suggesting, incorrectly, that our war in Iraq stems from ulterior motives.

This can't go on. The United States military has got to start making visible preparations for fighting two wars at once. The North Koreans have got to start worrying that if they start up their plutonium reprocessing facility, we will blow it up. And we have got to start lining up the diplomatic ducks - not for a round of negotiations with North Korea, but for the reentry of weapons inspectors, peacefully if possible but by force if necessary. The Chinese need to get the message: we will not tolerate a nuclear North Korea. And we will not rely on the regime to "declare" itself non-nuclear. We will rely only on Western observers, on the ground, with full access to the country, to prove that there's no nuclear program going on. If the Chinese don't want a military confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea, they should have a confrontation of their own.

This, it seems to me, is the minimum for us to be credible. It is the minimum for us to be able to launch the necessary war against Iraq with at least a fig-leaf of international support, and the minimum to keep North Korea from coming to the conclusion that it is home-free and blackmail will always work. In which case, triple the list of countries on the list to buy some of that North Korean nuclear technology. If we keep going down this road, I'm afraid John Derbyshire is going to be proved right on Iraq, and that Iran is going to go nuclear within months, with North Korean help. That'll leave us 0 for 3 against the Axis of Evil at the dawn of 2004.

Happy New Year.
posted by Noah at 4:23 PM

 
This is probably a really stupid idea, but I'm going to engage The Corner in their ongoing debate about Max Boot's piece on neoconservatism: quid est?

First of all, strictness in taxonomy is a mug's game. Something that should be in always gets left out and something wrong included in. We all have some idea of what a neo-conservative is when we see one, even if we can't define it perfectly. It's also silly to limit the label "neoconservative" to those individuals to whom it was first applied, for at least two reasons. First, what makes the phenomenon interesting is the extent to which it is an intellectual tradition, which means it must have descendants who may or may not be former leftists or liberals themselves, and may indeed have been "right from the beginning." Second, individual neoconservatives may change. They may abandon former beliefs and become something else: liberals, theocons, what have you.

My own preferred method of characterization of intellectual streams is genealogically. So let's try that.

Neoconservatives are Liberals. By that I mean neither that they are Lockean believers in the individual right to property nor that they are contemporary believers in coddling all sorts of sorry people. I mean something broader and deeper: that they understand themselves to be heirs to the Enlightenment, believers in Reason and Progress and that sort of thing. This distinguishes them fundamentally from Romantic and traditionalist conservatives. They may agree with Romantics or traditionalists on a particular point of policy, even on a broad outlook on a whole host of issues. But they will agree from different premises. The traditionalist will say that such and such is so because it has always been so, our ancestors always held it to be so, for generations we have held it to be so, and it is not for us to part ways with a so that has so lengthy a pedigree. A Romantic will say that such and such is so because it is the ineffable expression of the so-ness of something, and that this something would be utterly not itself were this not so; for someone who partakes of the something to hold that it is not so would be to be totally false to that something, a denial of its essential so-ness, and the greatest heresy. A neoconservative would say that such and such is so because it makes sense that it is so, most people have concluded it is so, there's empirical verification that it is so, those who argue it is not so are starry-eyed utopians or are just trying to arrogate power to themselves, and, even if we cannot conclude definitively that it is so at all times and everywhere, certainly there's no justification for holding it to be not so here and now.

You can recognize this kind of reasoning most plainly in neoconservative stances on "values" issues and on crime. (One of the failures of Max Boot's article is to associate neoconservatism entirely with foreign affairs. The line about being mugged by reality was not only figurative but literal - the great crime wave from the 1960s through the 1980s mugged as many liberals into neoconservatism as did the persistence of Soviet aggression in the face of detente.) The whole "broken-windows" school of policing is a classic neoconservative policy initiative. Something that most people would characterize as common sense - let a block, neighborhood or city go to seed with petty crime and serious crime will also explode - is justified with empirical studies and detailed logical reasoning.

Within the Liberal tradition, neoconservatives are Nationalists. This connects them, ironically enough, with the British Tory tradition and the American Whig (or National Republican) tradition. The old British Tories believed in a strong national government, while the Whigs believed in a more limited government and lower taxes. (The Tories believed in other things that your typical neoconservative might or might not believe, but we'll take that matter up later.) In the United States, the Jacksonian Democratic Republicans, while accused by their opponents of tyranny, were advocates of a weak (but geographically expansionist) central government, while the National Republicans (later the Whigs) favored a vigorous central government dedicated to internal economic development (Henry Clay's "American System.") Neoconservatives trace their roots back to this Nationalist tradition within Liberalism.

That's why neoconservatives don't generally get terribly excited by the size of the welfare state or by the size of government generally. They favor a strong and vigorous central government. They are much more likely to object to the welfare state on values grounds than on the grounds of economics or first principals about the proper nature of government. They see nothing improper in the government taxing to improve the lot of the citizenry, or of the weakest element among the citizenry. And they are, frankly, not so interested in economics. They believe in economic growth, progress and dynamism; they have outsourced to others the proof that free-market economics is the best road to these ends. Neoconservatives are against tyranny, but they don't identify all government, however constituted or structured, as to some extent necessarily tyrannical. This fundamentally divides them from Lockean libertarians (who do think all government is necessarily somewhat tyrannical) and from traditionalists (who understand tyranny to be an abrogation of precedent by either the State or society, and who are therefore to some extent constitutionally opposed to the dynamism that both libertarians and neocons favor). Here's a genealogical way to encapsulate this thought: George Orwell was a Socialist because (among other things) he thought Socialism worked and capitalism didn't. He was wrong. But if Socialism did work, I suspect most neoconservatives would be Socialists.

There are neoconservatives who take their nationalism even further. There is a Straussian tendency in neoconservatism, a tendency to elitism, to reifying the State in a Continental and very un-Anglo-Saxon manner, and to an Ancient rather than a Modern understanding of Liberty. That is to say: neoconservatives have a tendency to understand Liberty not as being left alone by the State but as the right (even the obligation) to participate in collective enterprise through the State. This isn't an absolute thing; neoconservatives are not Jacobins, and they approve of liberty in negative sense. But it isn't what stirs them in their marrow bones. This once again puts them very much at odds with libertarian-style conservatives and with traditionalists. What saves them from being Germans altogether is that they are not Romantics - they ground their views in Liberal premises. They may not always have the greatest appreciation of negative liberty, but their understanding of individual welfare is a Liberal one, not a Romantic one. Good thing, too, or they'd be very dangerous.

Some people, of course, think they are very dangerous anyhow, on the grounds of their foreign policy ideas. I think Max Boot overreaches a bit in his identification of neoconservatives with "hard Wilsonianism." His underlying assumption that neocons have a Whiggish view of history is correct - Progress and all that - and, since they believe in a vigorous and dynamic State, they would see nothing wrong with "helping history along" as it were. But there is an enormous difference between progressive and utopian internationalisms. It is the difference between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. TR did not try to set up a system for governing the world, whether hard (based on raw Anglo-American power) or soft (based on treaties and supra-national bodies) or a combination of the two (which is arguably what Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman inaugurated in the 1940s). He sought to use American power in American interests, and he had an enlightened view of what those interests consisted of and an optimistic view of the possibility of improving the world through the exercise of power. That sounds like the basic neocon view to me.

Neocons are distinguished from Wilsonians - even hard Wilsonians - because they do not want to run the world and because they do not feel obliged to right all of the world's wrongs. That is why the editorial board of The New Republic is fundamentally not neoconservative, even though they get along very well with neoconservatives with whom they share fundamental objectives. Neocons and Wilsonians alike value democracy and freedom, alike believe that the spread of democracy is in American interests, alike believe that the internal character of a regime affects its foreign policy (this is a key insight that realists reject), and alike believe that more likely than not democracy and freedom are universal goods that will appeal to the whole planet. But Wilsonians also believe that there is a moral obligation to "make the world safe for democracy;" that America should not get its hands dirty by trucking with dictatorships; and that America is obliged to take the lead in ordering the world according to a rational and humane fashion. "Soft" Wilsonians would achieve these things by international law and negotiation, and "hard" Wilsonians by force. But neocons properly reject all of these particulars. They believe, rather, that it is a good thing, not a moral obligation, to promote democracy; that America sometimes has to deal with dictators for the sake of larger interests, even particularly odious ones; and that the world is not supposed to be "ordered" according to some grand design, but rather than America should, as a matter of Enlightened self-interest, stand on the side of the forces of light where possible.

If neocons are animated by a concern for American interests above all - if understood in an Enlightened manner - then how are they distinguished from the so-called realists? Primarily by their Whiggish optimism. Realists have a pronounced tendency to declinism, to the belief that power inevitably dissipates - at least in a relative sense - and exercise of power dissipates it more quickly. Further, they tend to believe that existing arrangements are the most stable, and changing them more likely to injure American interests than to advance them. This is an old, Tory view of the world, one that arguably was born in the crucible of the Indian Mutinee, which ushered in the British Imperial policy of indirect rule through existing native elites (and the creation of these elites where they arguably did not exist). Neocon optimism leads them to be far more eager to exercise national power than are the realists.

How, then, are neocons distinguished from paleocon views on foreign policy? Max Boot's disparagement notwithstanding, the so-called paleocon foreign policy tradition has a long pedigree in this country, not limited to the pre-WWII America Firsters. I think the proper term for this tradition - again, in keeping with my own preference for the genealogical - is Jacksonian, from President Andrew Jackson. Jackson had a very dim view of the central government at home, dismantling America's central bank and opposing tarriffs (which National Republicans favored as a way to develop industry). But he did not have a similarly dim view of the central government abroad. Rather, he favored the use of national power to expand the United States. His Democrat predecessors had made deals with France and war on England to take Louisiana and to attempt to take Canada, and defined Latin America as an exclusive American sphere of influence; his successors made war on Mexico and would happily have added Cuba and other territories had the Whigs (worried about the expansion of the Slave Power) not frustrated their designs. A modern update of this philosophy would be to favor the use of national power to promote American interests defined narrowly rather than in an Enlightened manner. The Jacksonian tradition is deeply pessimistic about the ability to improve the world, but much more optimistic about America's ability to gain power through the use of power, which is what distinguishes them from the realists.

I will admit that there is a strain in neoconservative thinking that corresponds to the crusading caricature of the paleocons. These folks - and I'm not sure whether or not Max Boot is among them - are indeed advocates of a kind of hard Wilsonianism, advocates of what amounts to an American Empire. I think this is an extraordinarily foolish ambition, and I don't think more than a handful of writers ascribe to this notion. Certainly the prominent neocons in the Bush Administration - such as Paul Wolfowitz - do not ascribe to it. But there are a few writers out there who have this notion. The proximate basis for their views is the American victory in the Cold War and America's consequent position is overwhelmingly dominant power on the global stage. Given that neocons generally have no problem with the exercise of national power, at home or abroad, it is understandable that some would fall under the utopian temptation, the belief that our power is so great that it has practically no limits. As I said, this is a very dangerous and false idea, but I don't think it is one with general currency among neocons.

Apart from the proximate cause, the deeper cause of such a crusading neoconservative strain is a particular interpretation of America's two crusading wars: the Civil War and World War II. These were the only wars that America fought to a conclusion of unconditional surrender, and the notion of unconditional surrender seems to have taken hold in the crusaders' minds and become a model for how wars of righteousness are to be fought. The crusaders' understanding of the Civil War is not really wrong, but it is important to recall that this was a war for the definition of America, not a war to conquer the world. I do think that makes all the difference. As for World War II, I think their interpretation is fundamentally flawed, a misreading backwards from the conclusion of that war and the advent of the Cold War. We did not insist on unconditional surrender because we wanted a free hand to reshape Europe in our image; we demanded unconditional surrender because we wanted to break the back of German nationalism once and for all. It was the nature of our enemy that dictated our strategy, not the nature of our own ambitions. We did not fight World War II to save the Germans from Hitler.

And we most certainly did not fight World War II to save the Jews from Hitler. This would seem to be an opportune time to bring up the question that Max Boot addresses without confronting: why are there so many Jews among the neoconservatives? This is not an inadmissable question. Unless one has a preexisting animus towards Jews, it in no way undermines the legitimacy of neoconservative thinking to point out that there are many Jews among its leading thinkers, any more than it undermines the legitimacy of anti-Communism to note that exile communities from Poland, the Ukraine and so forth were among its strongest adherents. It is nonetheless of legitimate sociological interest to ask: why so many Jews, particularly in comparison with other streams of conservative thinking?

The deep reason, I think, is that outside of the ultra-Orthodox communities, Jews overwhelmingly identify as broadly Liberal, and neoconservatism is part of the Liberal tradition. The Enlightenment is rightly seen as having been of enormous benefit to the Jewish people, and so - again, outside of ultra-Orthodoxy - there isn't any strong anti-Liberal strain in Jewish political thinking. Jewish conservatives in Israel might be Romantic, or traditionalist, or theo-con - though, among those of Western origin, most are Liberal there, too - but none of these are very plausible positions for a diaspora community.

With respect to foreign policy, on a very practical level, Jewish interests are bound up with the fate of the State of Israel. Realists are unlikely to take risks to defend an ally like Israel (though Nixon, a consummate realist, did). Traditionalists and libertarians are unlikely to favor an active foreign policy of any kind, and Jacksonian paleos are unlikely to want allies in the first place. Among rational foreign-policy outlooks (I leave out the pacifist and anti-American outlooks which are shockingly popular among American Jews considering where Jewish interests actually lie) that leaves Wilsonianism (hard or soft) and neoconservatism as the most compatible with objective Jewish interests.

Less practically, I think, the Jewish romance with the State of Israel has changed many Jews' understanding of national power. The creation of Israel, its stunningly unlikely success, and specifically the importance of the exercise of military power to its success, have made many admiring Jews more favorably inclined toward the exercise of national and military power. Those affected by this change, meanwhile, joined a more longstanding Jewish tradition in the West of strong national feeling towards their country of origin - Jews served with enthusiasm and distinction in World War I on both the French and the German side (and, I believe, in disproportionate numbers to their share of the population) and on both sides in the American Civil War. And then there's Disraeli, the paradigm of the type, a man who, though a baptized Christian, still considered himself a Jew, and was a most ardent aggrandizer of British national power and glory. The strong nationalism of French, German, British and American Jews was grounded in their self-understanding as citizens, equal with their Christian neighbors. In any event, this feeling persists as much as national feeling does generally (that is to say, stronger in America than in Britain or France, stronger in Britain or France than in Germany), and it is obvious how it would lend itself to a neoconservative outlook.

Returning to World War II: the problematic aspect of crusading neoconservatism stems from the misinterpretation of World War II, and this misinterpretation is, I think, a Jewish misinterpretation. The Holocaust was, of course, one of the two or three worst catastrophes to befall the Jewish people in their entire history, comparable to the destructions of the First and Second Temples. It was also, of course, a modern crime of monstrous proportions, the epitome of evil in the 20th century. It is understandable that Jews would interpret World War II almost entirely by the light of the fires of Auschwitz. But this is a spiritual interpretation that would be primarily persuasive to Nazis and Jews, much less so to the world at large. Hitler may indeed have started his war in order to murder the Jews of Europe. That may even have been his primary objective. But that is not why he was fought by Britain or America, and it is not why the Allies demanded unconditional surrender. The extraordinary evil of the Nazi regime was secondary; what was primary was its extraordinary threat.

By misreading World War II as a crusading war against a regime of diabolical evil, some neoconservatives have created a template for the exercise of American power that is profoundly unrealistic. They have developed a notion that America - with friends if possible but unilaterally if necessary - must destroy great evil wherever it lives, a remake societies by force where they are in the thrall of evil. This is a template for an American imperium that could never be - and will never be - put into practice. And while I suspect it is something of a fringe phenomenon, writers who have made rhetorical gestures in the direction of an American Imperium - and Bill Kristol is prominent among them - may yet discredit the entire enterprise of neoconservative foreign policy through overreaching. In any event, they are certainly providing useful fodder to opponents of neoconservative thinking who seek to reduce it to caricature.
posted by Noah at 11:33 AM

 
It's been a surprisingly busy day today, so blogging has been light (so far). But the system is crashing, so I thought I'd comment on the latest troubles in the Democratic House leadership. It seems Nancy Pelosi doesn't understand black folks. Worse than Lott she is. And funny thing: the CBC has a point. Here's the money quote, from a leadership staffer:

"[I]f the Black Caucus is complaining about Pelosi not picking a person of color, and that seems to be their only complaint, they're being just as closed-minded as they claim Pelosi is. I mean, Matsui is a person of color."

Earth to Democratic Leadership: the only people who think this way are rich liberals and college kids. The vaunted "Rainbow Coalition" exists entirely in their minds. Americans of Japanese descent and American blacks have, to a first approximation, no interests and no culture in common (except in as much as they are all Americans, a characteristic they share with Republican-leaning groups and therefore not particularly germane to this kind of analysis). If you doubt this, run a little test. Who do you send out to rouse black voters in a close Louisiana Senate race - a black House Democrat, or a Japanese House Democrat?

Bill Clinton, our first Black President, could square the circle of putting together the money elite and the popular base of the Democratic Party. Dick Gephardt never quite connected with the money crowd, but at least he had a feel for the voters. Pelosi is a pure creature of the money elite. She actually thinks black voters - and politicians - think like they teach they do at Berkeley.

All around the country, in the most durably Democratic areas, Democratic hegemony is coming apart because of the disenchantment of black voters and their alienation from the party elite. That's what sank the Dems in the last NYC mayoral race. That was the primary dynamic driving the last LA mayoral race. And Al Sharpton is revving up for a Presidential run in 2004. It's going to be ugly, folks.
posted by Noah at 6:18 PM

 
I finally got around to reading Mayor Bloomberg's Vision for Lower Manhattan. Guess what: it's really, really good.

The plan is anchored in a few, key truths:

* Downtown is now a 24-hour neighborhood, not a business district, but it lacks crucial amenities to make it a real family neighborhood.
* As a business district, downtown suffers crucially from poor transportation links to the airports and to the suburbs.
* New York City as a whole and downtown in particular make extraordinarily poor use of its waterfront, which in most cities is a magnet for tourism and recreation.

The plan, therefore, is oriented around solving each of these problems. Public investments to create new parks, a tree-lined promenade on West Street, and facilities on the waterfronts will make the area far more attractive to residents. Less-expensive investments in amenities like schools and libraries would logically follow the private-sector creation of new housing in developments similar in concept to Battery Park City. New transportation links to Newark Airport and Kennedy Airport (by train), the LIRR and by ferry to Laguardia Airport and the New Jersey suburbs would dramatically improve access to downtown as a business destination. (It's a shame that there's no link planned to MetroNorth; that would seem to be too expensive.) These transportation upgrades chew up 80% of the budget for the plan.

The emphasis is on building neighborhoods and creating a city friendly to pedestrians, commuters, tourists and residents. It's a sensible plan that would significantly upgrade the quality of life downtown. And it would have positive spillover effects. A more viable downtown Manhattan would also mean a more viable downtown Brooklyn, and would make the New Jersey suburbs most convenient to downtown more attractive as well. Investing in a plan like this is the best way to ensure that New York recovers more quickly from the current slump.

Of course, there are other investments needed as well. The far West Side of Midtown - the 30s through 50s west of 8th Avenue - is a region crying out for a new business district. They are talking about extending the #7 train starting next year, providing a key transportation link; that would probably be the biggest bang-for-the-buck transportation improvement the city could make. Other plans for the area will probably wait until we see if we win the Olympics bid, since that area is where most of the Olympic facilities would be located. The Long Island City area of Queens is another area that should be developed. And I'm going to throw in my own pet area for development: Red Hook. With regular ferry service to downtown and midtown, Red Hook could be radically transformed in a few years into a premier outer-borough residential area. The views are spectacular from there and the only reason the area is has remained a slum (albeit a "funky" one, with artists and the like moving in) is the lack of transportation links to Manhattan; there are no subway lines in the neighborhood.

The city needs badly to invest in the future. Bloomberg clearly sees this. One the things Giuliani did very poorly was planning. He got many things right - including the most important thing: fighting crime - but this is one thing he got wrong. Bloomberg is headed in very much the right direction. But none of this is going to happen unless his Administration also gets the city's operating budget under control. The city is just not fiscally credible enough to invest the way it needs to. That means making tough decisions, and challenging entrenched interests, to reduce city spending. We have got to be more effecient about bus service, about social services, and about the big kahuna: education. If we don't spend less on running the city, the interest costs from these kinds of crucial investments will be unsustainable. On this matter - reducing spending - Bloomberg's record is far more equivocal, even negative.

Bloomberg was elected to do three things. First, hold the line on crime. So far, pretty much so good, though it's early innings yet. Second, reform education. So far, not so good; much of what has happened has been symbolic, and we're all waiting to see whether Bloomie has the guts to challenge entrenched interests or whether he's just going to tinker. He's won control of the schools; now he has to use it. Third, rebuild the city. Here he gets a mixed grade. His ideas about development are mostly excellent. But his ability to achieve them depend on his handling of the budget and taxes, which has been fair to poor.

Give him credit where credit is due: if he achieves half of what he's planned development-wise, Bloomberg will go down in history as the Baron Hausmann of 21st century New York. Now let's see if he's got the guts to do what's necessary to pay for it.
posted by Noah at 12:31 PM

 
So, what with all the horrible news around the world, let's talk about something completely irrelevant: Supreme Court Vacancies.

Okay, it's not completely irrelevant. But both conservatives and liberals have a vastly over-inflated sense of the importance of the Supreme Court.

Liberals think the Court picked the last election. Now, I think Bush v. Gore was a poor decision. I think the equal-protection rationale for the decision is very problematic, inconsistent with conservative principles, and, in any event, completely inconsistent with the remedy ordered. An Article II violation, meanwhile, was emotionally persuasive - the Florida Court decision was ridiculous, in no way reflected the law, and seemed designed to prejudice the outcome - would have entailed a massive innovation in doctrine. We'd need a whole new area of law to come up with tests to determine when a decision is "interpretation" and when it is inadmissable "law-making" - and this sort of thing is not what one associates with conservative jurisprudence. But all that aside, the Court did not change the overwhelmingly likely outcome in the 2000 elections. Had the Court refused to hear Bush v. Gore, the best-case outcome for the Gore camp would have been to have two slates emerge from Florida: one certified by the Secretary of State and reaffirmed by the Florida Legislature and the other certified by the Florida Supreme Court. In which case, Congress would have settled the matter. And Congress was at the time (and still is) controlled by the Republicans. What are the odds that they would have voted to make Gore President? Essentially nil. The Court's intervention weakened its own credibility in a bid to increase its power. It did not change political history.

Conservatives and liberals alike think that the Supreme Court, with the right appointees, would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. They are both wrong. The Court is not going to overturn Roe v. Wade. A Court willing to take that dramatic step would never be confirmed by the Senate. The Court is very sensitive to its own credibility. It values that credibility more than the rightness of any one decision. Therefore, even if by stealth a Court were confirmed that intended to overturn Roe, it would not do so until there was a clear social consensus in favor of such action.

I do, by the way, expect Roe to be overturned some day. But not 5-4. Plessy v. Ferguson was effectively overturned by Brown v. Board of Ed. The latter decision was 9-0. Dred Scott was overturned by the Civil War, not by the Court. Lochner v. New York was not decisively laid to rest until FDR threatened to pack the Court; the Court had supported its own precedent against the social consensus until such a position became unsustainable. That's how it will be with Roe: when there is a general social consensus that the decision was wrong and must be changed, it will be changed. Not before.

The Court is not completely irrelevant, of course. It can change things at the margins. It can, like any branch of government, increase or decrease the people's confidence in its abilities, can arrogate more power to itself or dissipate it, and so forth. So it's interesting to speculate on how President Bush is going to shape the Court.

The most likely retirees are Rhenquist and O'Connor. O'Connor will only stay if she gets to be Chief Justice. Stevens will retire only when his health begins to fail. Scalia will retire if he gets bored or fed up. Ginsberg might do the same, or if her health became an issue. Thomas, Kennedy, Breyer and Souter will be on the Court for many years to come.

Rhenquist is the leading advocate of the "New Federalism," which, in fact, amounts to arrogating to the Court the responsibility for delineating the proper boundaries of state sovereignty (since there is no apparent hard-and-fast rule for such delineation). Liberals object that this amounts to the Court vetoing acts of Congress that it doesn't like when it can justify the veto on the grounds of state sovereignty, and letting such decisions slide when they don't object. In any event, without Rhenquist this particular judicial philosophy will drop a notch in prestige. The other two leading conservatives on the Court - Scalia and Thomas - have different bugaboos, and the liberals on the Court are actively hostile.

O'Connor is identified primarily with muddle. She is the least predictable and least comprehensible Justice on the Court. If she is elevated to Chief Justice, we can look forward to several years of total confusion. I hope President Bush doesn't make this mistake. If he doesn't, she's likely to retire.

With Rhenquist and O'Connor out, the state of Arizona will entirely lack representation on the Supreme Court. Why this does not prompt the Administration to immediately redress the under-representation of Arizona on the Court is beyond me (after all, Arizona has been trending into the toss-up column). But they seem more intent on elevating a Hispanic or female candidate.

I actually think Gonzales would be a perfectly fine choice for the Court. I don't think he's a Souter or a Scalia. He's not going to push a particular judicial philosophy strongly and I don't think he's a liberal manquee. He'll be a consensus man, and therefore a fit replacement for O'Connor. And I suspect he'll reason more coherently than she does.

Of the various Appeals Court nominees Bush has given us, I'm most pleased with Michael McConnell, possibly because he's one of the few of them that I know something about. In any event, what I know pleases me, and I hope there's ultimately a spot for him at the top. But I doubt it; he hasn't earned his political chops yet.

What I think is in some ways a more interesting question than "whom will Bush appoint to the Court" is "whom will he appoint Chief Justice." If he appoints someone from outside, it will have to be someone confirmable. That means someone without a strong judicial philosophy, frankly, because an obvious ideologue won't be confirmed, and frankly, Bush does not need a high-profile Supreme Court fight unless he is highly confident of victory. So for conservatives, I think an outside candidate means a weaker candidate.

Unless, of course, the inside candidate is awful. The most-often mentioned potential choices for a candidate from on the Court are: O'Connor, Kennedy and Scalia. O'Connor would, as stated above, be a disaster. Kennedy - who shows the most obvious signs of coveting the job - would be almost as bad. His decisions, unlike O'Connor's, appear to be reasoned. But the reasoning varies widely from case to case such that, in the end, my conclusion is that he's a sophist: he knows what a legal argument looks like, and constructs one to suit the conclusion he wants to come to in a particular case, regardless of whether it is consistent with precedent or his own past decisions. He's a mess.

Scalia would certainly make conservatives happy. But he would be a lousy choice, for two reasons. First, there would be a fight. Yes, Bush would likely win because, as a sitting Supreme Court Justice, it's hard to argue that Scalia would not be qualified for the job. But Scalia prides himself on being a gadfly, on picking fights for the sake of illustrating a principle, which means he has a potent record of statements - in decisions and in other writing - that will be used against him in confirmation hearings. Bush will have to give ground elsewhere - probably on his choice for a new member of the Court - in order to win a fight to make Scalia Chief.

And then, once he was confirmed, Scalia would be a lousy Chief for the same reasons that he would be a hard-to-confirm nominee. He's a provocateur, not a consensus builder. He revels in his dissents. He would be understood by everyone to be on the rightmost edge of the Court. If Bush nominated a Gonzales to fill the empty slot left by a Rhenquist retirement, and made Scalia Chief, Scalia would be Chief in name only because the center of the Court would form around Gonzales as the most articulate Justice most likely to bring Kennedy and O'Connor along with him.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the best inside candidate for Chief Justice is Clarence Thomas. The old claim of inexperience is no longer valid; next year he will have served on the Supreme Court for 12 years. He would be harder for liberals to fight this time than last time, for three reasons. First, he's already on the Court. Second, after Clinton the whole Anita Hill thing could not be repeated with a straight face. Third, and most importantly, there is an enormous difference between being appointed the the Court and being appointed Chief Justice. Back when Thomas was being appointed to the Court, he was derided as a Scalia tool. That's much less plausible if he's Chief Justice. How do you call someone an Uncle Tom when they're running the joint? Who, precisely, can pull the strings of a man who has risen to the absolute top of his profession and holds his position for life?

I also think Thomas' views are the most compatible with President Bush's views, more so than Scalia's or Rhenquist's. Rhenquist, as I said, is most identified with the "New Federalism." Scalia, meanwhile, is most identified as a species of Formalist - or, perhaps better, a hybrid of Formalist and Traditionalist. Thomas, by contrast, is best identified as a devotee of "Natural Law." Scalia, as a Formalist, would argue that non-ennumerated rights do not exist. Thomas, by contrast, has argued that rights really do exist out there in nature, and are not merely a creation of law, and that, for example, the Declaration of Independence is a good guide to what those rights are. Our natural rights are prior to the Constitution and, in some sense, overrule it. Of course, Thomas is a judicial conservative, which is to say he's against creating rights by judicial fiat; but his reasoning, in a nutshell, is that the basic right is the right of the people to self-government, which is violated by having the Court act as a ruling priesthood.

Scalia and Thomas vote alike most of the time. But where they differ, the differences are interesting, and in general Thomas differs when his understanding of Natural Law, which springs from the Declaration of Independence, conflicts with a pure judicial formalism. I think that President Bush would be more likely to vote as Thomas does than as Scalia when they do differ. I also think that Thomas' views are more likely to move the consensus on the Court going forward than are Scalia's; I think Scalia has made all the converts he is going to make, and for the rest of his term his opponents will devote themselves to arguing that he is, in fact, not a Formalist but a partisan - an argument that is easier to sustain in the wake of Bush v. Gore.

So there: you have my votes. I expect Gonzales to be appointed upon Rhenquist's departure, so I'm not bothering to vote for or against, only to predict that he won't be another Souter. I vote for Thomas to replace Rhenquist as Chief Justice. I vote for McConnell to be elevated to the Court as soon as possible, preferably to replace O'Connor.
posted by Noah at 11:15 AM

 
An yet more good news: N. Korea to Expel U.N. Inspectors. Expelling the UN is, of course, necessary if one wants to produce electricity from a nuclear plant. At least it looks like this is bringing the rest of the world around to the conclusion that the regime is run by homicidal maniacs. Which, in turn, means implementing the Iraq model will be that much quicker and easier in North Korea.
posted by Noah at 9:42 AM

 
More good news: Suicide Bombers Kill 32 in Grozny.
posted by Noah at 9:39 AM

 
I can't decide whether to hope this news is true or bogus: Scientist Claims to Produce Human Clone.

On the one hand, it would be very good for people to realize this is upon us. Then we might get some legislative action on the question.

On the other hand, this is upon us.

I want to stress, as I have in the past, that the primary reason to ban human cloning for reproductive purposes does not require any novel ethical concepts. The procedure is plainly far too dangerous to the infant. The incidence of birth defects in cloned animals is very high; as an example, many of them age prematurely, a terrible fate to doom a child to. We can disagree about whether, in theory, safe reproductive cloning would be a good thing or a bad thing, and whether cloning for research purposes is categorically wrong, perfectly OK, or somewhere in between. We can nonetheless agree that reproductive cloning should be illegal now for a very simple reason: it is a danger to the life and health of the human being brought to life in this manner. It is one thing to nurture and love a human being who suffers from genetic abnormalities. It is another to coutenance a form of medical intervention known to cause such abnormalities.
posted by Noah at 9:31 AM

 
Remember the old Tom Lehrer song?

First we got the bomb, and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Russia got the bomb, but that's okay,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way.
Who's next?

France got the bomb, but don't you grieve;
They're on our side (I believe).
China got the bomb, but have no fears;
They can't wipe us out for at least five years.
Who's next?

Egypt's gonna get one, too,
Just to use on you-know-who.
So Israel is getting tense;
Wants one in self-defense;
The Lord's our shepherd says the psalm,
But just in case, we're gonna get a bomb.

Luxembourg was next to go,
And who knows, maybe Monaco;
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb.

Cute. Nice we could joke about it once, back when we were really only scared of the Russkies. The current nuclear club stands as follows:

USA
Russia
China
Britain
France
Israel (undeclared, but not fooling anybody)
India
Pakistan
North Korea

Here are a couple of other countries that might have the bomb or could have it very soon:

* South Africa (they say they ended their program. You sure they ain't lying?)
* Iraq (we believe they are still a couple of years away. Last time we thought that, they were within six months of completion of their first device.)
* Iran (they've been working on this since the days of the Shah. They'll have it soon, if they don't already.)
* Ukraine (they supposedly returned all nuclear warheads to Russia. You sure they did?)
* Kazakhstan (ditto)
* Lybia (feeling left out of the Axis of Evil, they're working furiously to catch up and re-establish their bonifides)
* Japan, Germany, South Korea (it's not like it would be hard for any of these guys to go nuclear, if they felt insecure or anything)
* Democratic Republic of Congo (that's right, the basket case in the middle of Africa, a country without a functioning central government and occupied by the armies of various neighboring states has a nuclear plant; who knows what they've been doing with the material from it?)

There's probably a bunch of other countries I've left out. The cat is out of the bag. He's running around the room clawing the drapes and peeing on the carpet. He's gotten into the trash and the houseplants. And he's keenly aware of all the other out-of-the-bag cats, particularly the lady cats in heat, and has been making frequent trips around the neighborhood to meet with all of said lady cats to increase the out-of-bag cat population.

So what are we planning to do about news like this?

Here's what I'm worried about. We're about to go to war with Iraq, a country we believe is just shy of developing the bomb. Let's assume this invasion goes splendidly, Saddam's air defenses are annihilated in the first 6 hours, his missile batteries are wiped out on the ground and the handful that are fired are shot out of the sky, his army is routed in the field and his chief bonbon maker slips him a cherry-liquer mickey and cuts off his head as a goodwill gesture to the advancing allied armies. One down. Half a dozen to go. Have we made the larger task any easier? Have we really made progress?

Well, if the Iranian army decides this would be a good time to take back their country from the mullahs, then my answer would be yes. But if not, it seems to me the answer might be no. After all, what kind of signal have we sent to the proliferators of the world? North Korea violates an agreement, builds nuclear weapons, and threaten us with nuclear war if we don't meet their demands. So far, we haven't met those demands. But we haven't come up with any other bright ideas for dealing with them either. Pakistan builds nuclear weapons, provides safe harbor for anti-American terrorists, and the United States relies on them as a key ally in the war on terror - and pressures their nuclear-armed neighbor, India, not to wage defensive war against them - because we can't afford to let their nukes fall into the hands of the real bad guys. It seems to me, the message to Iran, etc. is: work faster. Once you have the bomb, you will be able to dictate terms to the United States. Your regime will be secure. You'll periodically have to make gestures that enable the U.S. to save face, but basically there's nothing we can do to threaten you.

War on Iraq will be useful in a few ways. It will eliminate one regime that has declared the U.S. to be an enemy and seeks our harm and will soon be able to do that harm on a catastrophic scale. It will increase our maneuverability vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia. It will demonstrate American resolve to the region generally. If we are able to build a stable, reasonably free Iraq, that's a big bonus, an example that other Arab states might look to as a model rather than the current favored model of anti-American thugocracy. But unless we do something decisive about North Korea, Pakistan and Iran, I think part of the message that the Iraq campaign will deliver will be: the U.S. only wants easy kills. We can't let that message take hold. The stakes are too high.

I'm not sure what we do about North Korea. I don't think an Osirak strategy - a surgical preemptive strike to take out the nukes - will be effective, and it has to be 100% effective or the consequences are too dire. Which means we have to follow the Iraq model: build an international consensus that the country must disarm and let in inspectors to prove there has been disarmament, or face invasion. If North Korea threatens to nuke Seoul or Tokyo if invaded, explain that the entire population of North Korea will be incinerated if that happens - and wouldn't it be much nicer for the Dear Leader to spend his retirement in a villa in Tahiti or Monaco rather than being incinerated along with all his loving subjects? But that might not work either, and again, the consequences of failure are dire.

Iran is, in some ways, tougher and in some ways easier. There's a chance that the country "tips" politically, in which case the whole worry about proliferation becomes much less serious. We could probably bribe a friendly, democratizing state to end its nuclear program. But it's tougher for a bunch of reasons, a key one being that all our other wars in the area - against Iraq, against Afghanistan - have increased Iranian power. We can't go to war with Iran without a firm foothold in these neighbors. And an Osirak strategy is not likely to work in Iran either; some of their nuclear facilities are very well-hardened.

But the toughest is Pakistan. We are pretty sure that Pakistan helped the North Koreans build their bomb. We have been treating them so gingerly precisely because we're afraid if they get pissed off they'll just toss a nuke al Qaeda's way. Then we really have problems. They are nominally an ally, so we can't really threaten them at all, much less attack them. What's our leverage? How do we respond credibly if we think they are playing a double-game - helping Lybia, say, to get the bomb?

The acid test right now, though, is North Korea. Iran doesn't have the bomb yet, and Pakistan is nominally our friend. North Korea has the bomb, and is our declared enemy. If we don't do anything about that - if we let them slide like we did for the last 10 years - our deterrence is shot, no matter what we do in Iraq.
posted by Noah at 5:39 PM

 
Of course, if the evildoers win at least we won't have to agonize about stuff like this anymore.
posted by Noah at 4:48 PM

 
Well, the Washington Post is full of good news this Christmas Eve day.
posted by Noah at 4:47 PM

 
Jennifer Dunn, freshen up your Rolodex. This woman must go down. And you're the one to take her.
posted by Noah at 4:40 PM

 
Israeli ultra-hawks are increasingly panicked about Bush's road-map (and Sharon's support for same) for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Israeli doves are increasingly gleeful about the prospect of Sharon's impending humiliation at the hands of the Quartet. But we all know that Sharon will be bailed out by his old friend Yasser who will never agree to anything, ever, anytime. Nice to know there are some constants in this world of change.
posted by Noah at 5:26 PM

 
You know you're taking your blog too seriously when you wake up at 3 in the morning with ideas for an item. But you're probably still okay if you can get back to sleep within 5 minutes.

The item: 3rd party nightmares.

Most folks are assuming that President Bush is going to be re-elected without too much trouble in 2004. We're even expecting him to add to his majorities in the House and Senate. He will, by then, have presumably won a war in Iraq, the economy will be somewhat on the mend, he'll have a handful of minor but soudbite-friendly domestic accomplishments to point to (leave no child behind and all that) and maybe even something significant (Medicare reform, anyone?) on the domestic front to point to. Plus he'll be the beneficiary of a broad trend towards greater patriotism and concerns about foreign policy that generally benefit Republicans.

None of this is foregone. We should win in Iraq, but we'll still be there in 2004, and "winning" by then won't be looking so pleasant. The economy might not be on the mend; I swing back and forth between bull and bear myself. Those legislative accomplishments might turn out to be thin on the ground.

But what could really take the wind out of W.'s sails, I think, is a credible challenge from the nationalist right.

Suppose a credible figure - not necessarily a politician; could be a Perot-type self-made businessman with a sharp speaking style and, preferably, a military background - came forward and said: we are not taking the war on terrorism seriously. We are getting caught in a classic trap of a dominant power, worrying about placating allies and maneuvering among rivals while letting our enemies get away. We're tying down our military in Iraq and Afghanistan because we were too humanitarian to use our full firepower, and scare potential enemies off ever attacking us again. We do not have the head of Osama bin Laden to hang outside the White House door, and so our enemies have no respect for us. We are unwilling to offend domestic minorities or Arab allies, and so we are vulnerable to further terrorist attack.

His platform would be simple, and consist of five planks:

(1) Secure the borders. There are people in this country with no right to be here, and some of them are a danger to the security of the country. Deport 'em all. At a minimum, deport all the ones from countries or with ethnic backgrounds that give us reason to worry. Rescind the student and other visas of people who come from suspect countries - including supposed allies like Saudi Arabia. Deploy the National Guard along our southern border and, if the Canadians won't play along, our northern border as well, to keep out undesireables. Damn the economic consequences; the economic consequences of a successful nuclear or biological attack on America would dwarf any possible cost to an enforcement of immigration laws and the encumbrance of trade.

(2) Raise the body count. Make it plain to our enemies that we don't care how many civilians are killed; if killers come from their country, they are going to get fried. Saudis not being forthcoming? Seize the oilfields, seize their overseas assets, and take Mecca hostage - any more terrorism against America or Americans and we nuke the place. The Arab world resents us because of their weakness? Show them just how weak they are, how completely impotent they are to protect themselves from our wrath. The message has to be clear: you want a war, you'll get a war, and we don't care if your civilization never recovers from the damage we do. Deliver that message and we'll finally get some results.

(3) Reinstitute the draft. We're in a world war but we don't have enough men to win. We let OBL get away because we didn't have the men on the ground to take Tora Bora ourselves. We're being played for suckers by a Korean nutjob with Don King's hair because we don't have the forces to take on two nutjob dictators at once. Well, why not? What are we waiting for? All those English grad students protesting America: give 'em a rifle and ship 'em out to the Straits of Malucca. That'll teach 'em something useful.

(4) End politically-correct pussyfooting. Look, there are people out there who want to kill us. Might as well know who they are and let our kids know. Islam is not a religion of peace. Stop pretending it is. Stop telling our children this isn't a war with Islam; it is, and they started it. You want to teach kids that America brought September 11th on ourselves? Go teach in Paris, or Beijing, or Riyadh. This country was founded by Christians, and has a Christian culture, and while we are tolerant of other faiths and treat everyone equally, we do not need to apologize for our civilization to anyone and we do not need to change because y'all are offended. If you don't like the products of our civilization, don't buy 'em. If you don't like it here, leave.

(5) Take care of Americans first. Our trade policy, our foreign policy, our immigration policy - all our policies - should be designed to take care of Americans first. Our allies and our trading partners need us more than we need them. If the Koreans don't want us, we should go home and leave them to the mercy of their Northern brothers. Ditto our "allies" in the Gulf. For that matter, ditto the Europeans, Egyptians, Israelis, Canadians - everybody who relies on American protection or aid to survive and then has the gall to set conditions for us or make further demands on us. There's only one superpower around. Get used to it. And get in line.

Now, there's stuff in that platform that is counterproductive, stupid or just wrong. My point was not to outline my dream candidate's platform by any means. My point was: a plain-spoken, tough-talking, angry but credible candidate like the above could take a bite out of Bush's hide. He would hammer away at the Bush family connection to the Saudis, the fact that OBL is still at large, the fact that the FBI and CIA haven't been revamped, the fact that illegal immigration is still massive. He would put the Bush Administration on the defensive in a way that a Democrat could not.

How well do you think such a candidate could do? 2% of the vote? 5% of the vote? How about if the economy was in a double-dip recession, and this candidate had an economically nationalist platform as well?

How well do you think he'd do if there were another, major successful attack on America, with thousands of casualties?

Of course, the Democrats have a third-party nightmare of their own. 2004 is going to present them with the same problems as 2002: the Democrats will have to somehow answer the Bush fiscal policy and the Bush foreign policy in a way that is credible to their base and credible to the country as a whole. In 2002, that meant attacking the Bush tax cut but not calling for its repeal and criticizing the plans for war in Iraq while voting for that war. Turned out to be a pretty poor strategy. So what will they do in 2004?

Whether they reprise the same strategy or turn right or left, the Democrats cannot credibly run in 2004 full-on against the war on terror. This country was attacked, and most of the country understands we won't become safe by running away and hiding our heads in the sand. The country wants a successful war and a successful homeland security strategy. The can run from it or embrace it or even try to one-up Bush on it, but they can't run against it without embracing a loss of McGovernite proportions. And that leaves an opening for the McGovernite left.

What do the Democrats do if a third-party candidate runs on the following four-plank platform?

(1) End the war. Yes, we were attacked by al Qaeda, and yes, that terrorism was indefensible. But we have removed the government of Afghanistan, and now we are occupying Iraq, and the war shows no sign of ending. Bush says the war will continue for a generation. The Democrats don't really argue with him about that, but are debating around the edges - how much attention we should pay to this target vs. that, how much we should defer to this ally vs. that. We are reviving the Cold War National Security State in a new and more dangerous form, and this will not end terrorism but will increase it, as every country we attack seethes with anger and resentment at us. The only solution is to end the war. We should continue to pursue specific targets of criminal investigation, under the auspices of international bodies such as the International Criminal Court. But we should immediately end the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, pull our troops home from Asia, stop undermining governments in the region and committing assassinations and other war crimes, and get out of places where we don't belong and are not wanted. The Democrats are afraid to say it, but we're not: war is not the answer; only justice is the answer.

(2) End fossil-fuel dependency. Whoever runs on the Democrat ticket will embrace some kinds of restrictions on fossil fuels. But nothing really serious. Nothing like raising gas taxes to European levels, or initiating a massive carbon tax, or committing to California-style restrictions on auto-emissions. Democrats, after all, do have to win some votes in the middle of the country. But third-party candidates don't. The argument is clear: the reason we were attacked on September 11th is that we are involved in a heavy-handed way in the politics of the Middle East. And the reason we are in the Middle East is our dependence on fossil fuels. If we care about saving American lives - and the environment, of course - the first thing we must do is dramatically reduce fossil-fuels use, and damn the economic consequences.

(3) End the alliance with Israel. Look, it's a simple fact that American support for Israel is not appreciated in the Arab and Muslim world. Israel is an ethnic nationalist, exclusivist state that is oppressing an Arab people by denying them equal citizenship in Israel or a viable state of their own alongside Israel. America should not be party to supporting such a country. Jews have suffered a great deal in history, but so have many other peoples, including the Palestinians. America should, at a minimum, end all aid to Israel until unconditional peace negotiations are resumed. We'll end terrorism a lot quicker by ending injustice than by dropping bombs.

(4) End economic racism at home. I have no idea what that means, but it is definitely part of the platform. The Democrats are afraid to reverse the Bush tax cut terrorism. They are afraid to challenge the corporate conspiracy state that gave us Enron and Worldcom and so forth. The Democrats are dependent on corporate money just like the Republicans; the only thing that changes is which corporations, and in some cases not even that. Etc. etc. - you know the drill.

This is pretty much the usual laundry list of lefty posturing. It isn't particularly popular in the country. But it is very popular on the fringes, and it will be more popular against a 2004 Democrat who refuses to attack Bush frontally on the war. And even if the war is bogged down and ineffective, the Democrats are not going to run on a platform of surrender; they are going to run on a platform of more competant foreign policy. That means the dogmatic anti-war types will be tempted to vote for their own candidate. In 2000, the Nader vote almost tipped Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington and Oregon to the GOP. A vigorous McGovernite campaign in 2004 should push all these states over the edge into Bush territory.
posted by Noah at 3:37 PM

 
Martin Kramer has revamped his website. It's a lot more readable now. One interesting tidbit I just read there: about Norman Pattiz' efforts behind Radio Sawa and plans for a companion T.V. station to beam American values to the Arab world. He's surprisingly convincing. And the pitch leaves me wondering: why do we need the U.S. government involved, necessarily? I'm not saying it would be cheap, but this would seem to be a no-brainer project for, say George Soros. I mean, this is what the Open Society is all about, isn't it? After doing so much to prepare the ground for the liberation of Eastern Europe, does Soros really want to be remembered for all time as the biggest donor in the history of NORML? Isn't there a lot of world left to liberate?
posted by Noah at 1:18 PM

 
Why My Son Won't Attend NYC Public Schools, Part LXXVIII.
posted by Noah at 1:04 PM

 
I haven't blogged about it in a while, but does anyone doubt that Iran has the potential to be the next Turkey - a pro-Western, pro-American, majority-Muslim secular democracy? Check out the latest from The Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran: Leave Palestine Alone, Think About Us! (scroll to the bottom).

Iran is building to one of two ends: Moscow in 1991 or Beijing in 1989. If Iranian patriots make a serious bid to seize power and drive out the mullahs, all will depend on what the army and the security forces do. If, as in Russia in 1991, they ultimately unwilling to suppress the people by force, then any attempted coup will fail and the people will prevail. If, as in China in 1989, they are bribed or persuaded to side with the regime, then there will be a dreadful slaughter of the Iranian people, but the regime will survive. The latter outcome would be terrible for the people of Iran, and terrible for American interests. All America's and her allies' moves in the region - the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the war to end Palestinian terrorism, the struggle to contain nuclear proliferation and to manage Pakistan, the development of the Caspian oil region, the effort to bolster Turkey's position as a Western Muslim nation - Iran is the key to everything. A friendly Iran makes everything possible and a hostile Iran makes everything more difficult, because all of our moves make Iran more powerful and more central.

In that regard, I continue to maintain that one small (well, not so small) thing we could do to advance the collapse of the Iranian regime would be to wipe out Hizballah. Hizballah is the most dangerous, anti-American and anti-Western terrorist group in the world after al-Qaeda, and it cooperates closely with al-Qaeda. No group is in a better position to disrupt our war plans, whether by starting a war with Israel or by taking direct action against Western targets. And Hizballah is a creature of the Iranian regime, their primary means of power projection well beyond their borders. Attack Hizballah, and the Iranian regime will have to either take the hit quietly, which would be devastating to the regime's prestige and credibility, or respond with direct attacks on America or our overseas assets. The latter, obviously suicidal course could, if the mullahs tried to implement it, push the Iranian armed forces to take the plunge and side with the people against the regime.

We do not want to go to war with Iran directly. We want a revolution there. One has been building now for at least five years. We need to do everything we can to secure its victory.
posted by Noah at 11:45 AM

 
John Derbyshire has his own comments on the Fred Reed piece I blogged about last week. It's a good column; check it out.
posted by Noah at 9:53 PM

 
Seriously folks, while I am pleased Senator Lott has resigned, he has damaged the Republican Party, and the Republican Party needs to undo the damage. That means showing by deeds that the Dixiecrat mentality has no hold on the modern GOP. Here's my preliminary list of 5 things to do and 5 things not to do:

DOS:

* Have Secretary Snow meet with Bono. That whole O'Neill trip to Africa was a good idea, not a bad one. Africa is going to have 2 billion people in 50 years, it's a major oil-producing region, it's a prime battleground in the war with the Islamo-fascists, and it's a region suffering from 14th-century level misery: the AIDS epidemic, genocidal warfare, massive deforestation, kleptocratic government, slavery, and on and on. And yet there are germs of hope - points of light, you might say - all over the continent. A pro-trade, pro-debt-relief, pro-democracy, anti-slavery, anti-Islamofascist policy on Africa fits right into Bush's broader agenda. All it takes is some attention, and willingness to stand up to interests - like agriculture and textile industries - that stand in the way. Heck, don't send Snow - send Bill Frist. He already knows the territory well.

* Develop an agenda for prison reform. Back in 2000, a nasty attack ad accused Bush of effectively killing James Byrd all over again by refusing to sign a hate-crime law in Texas. The charge was loopy, but in a more direct sense Bush - and his Democrat predecessor - contributed to Byrd's death, because his murderers were the products of the Texas penal system. There's a real risk that when the bad guys locked up in the '90s get out, we'll have a massive new crime wave, and there's very little the government is doing to reduce recidivism from our prisons. Maybe there's not much we can do. But why not invite Chuck Colson to the White House for a summit on the topic to see if he has any ideas.

* Promote a serious school-reform agenda. Bush got rolled by Ted Kennedy in 2001. Don't let the fight end there. Ending bi-lingual education, promoting charter schools, promoting school choice, raising standards for teachers and students - there's a huge reform agenda that has basically been abandoned, and while we all suffer for it black Americans suffer the most. Get this back on the front burner of domestic policy. If domestic policy has a front burner anymore.

* Continue the important outreach to black ministers. Look, no matter what he does, Bush isn't going to get a huge black vote in 2004. That's not the point. It's not good for America to have the parties deeply divided on racial lines. It's going to take a long time to build up sufficient trust for black voters to consider voting Republican in any significant numbers. Changing principles is not what's needed. But outreach and communication is. It's a generational effort. And it should be undertaken not because it'll bring a big electoral advantage - it won't, certainly not short-term - but because it's the right thing to do for the country. Hey: remember all those news stories about Bush potentially joining a black Methodist church in Washington? Wouldn't now be a good time to actually do it? Not saying he couldn't still church-hop, but being a dues-paying member at a black church, and praying there semi-regularly, would send a pretty clear signal, wouldn't it?

* Win the war. In the end, there's a reason this Administration has kind of abandoned domestic policy. Nothing else matters if we lose the war. So win it.

DONTS:

* Give in on affirmative action. Americans have been and remain strongly opposed to race-based affirmative action. They are far more supportive of class-based affirmative action that is race-blind. This should not be a difficult change in law to pull off or to defend in front of black audiences. If the ultimate result of the Lott farce is that Republicans abandon the principle that race should be a continually declining and ultimately null factor in law, that would be a real tragedy.

* Treat the NAACP as a moral arbiter. No one needs to apologize to them and no one needs to get their blessing. One of the many reasons Lott had to be removed was that with him around the GOP would have had no standing to articulate an alternative position to the NAACP on how to achieve racial harmony. They would have been racial hostages. Well, he's gone. The GOP passed the test; maybe not with an A+, but they passed. So don't get defensive.

* Make Colin Powell untouchable. If he's running an independent foreign policy, as it sometimes appears, he should be canned, and I don't care how popular he is. If he's got the full support of the President and they're playing some kind of good cop/bad cop routine, as it also sometimes appears, he should be retained, and I don't care how upset conservatives get. But his race should have nothing to do with it. He's not a token. He's not in his current position because he's black. He's in his current position because he is a powerful representative of America abroad, one who inspires confidence and in whom foreign leaders happily place their trust. That's exactly what you want in a Secretary of State, so long as he still has the confidence of the President.

* Go on a witch-hunt for closet segregationists - in either party. Nothing has been less edifying than hearing Republicans complain about Clinton's praise of the late Senator Fulbright or Senator Byrd's notorious Klan history and recent references to "white niggers." And even less will be gained by going after these kinds of figures now. Same goes for the GOP ranks. Lott was the head of the Republican leadership and he regretted the demise of segregation publicly, and failed to understand what was so terrible about what he said after he said it. There is no basis to tar by association everyone who voted with Lott, who was friends with Lott, who accepted Lott's apology, who was sponsored by Lott for one job or another - you get the idea. The point has been made. Hopefully everyone in the GOP - and the Democrats - got the point. If they didn't, and a comparably egregious circumstance arises in the future, that will be the time for an outcry. Not now.

* Run Al Sharpton-related ads in 2004. Let him destroy the Democratic Party on his own. You can't possibly help by making him an issue. Just let him do his thing and sit back and watch. And let the bloggers make the mock.
posted by Noah at 3:22 PM

 
Okay! With Lott out of the way, we can get our backs behind increasing the GOP majority in the Senate. Prepare your target lists:

Senator Patty Murray, Mom in tennis shoes and a burka
Senator Fritz Hollings, Senator from Mickey Mouse
Senator Chris Dodd, the Che Guevara of New England
Senator Barbra Streisand - I mean Barbara Boxer.

Yeah, I'm feeling pleased.
posted by Noah at 2:31 PM

 
Whoops! While I was posting, he stepped down!
posted by Noah at 11:00 AM

 
Looks increasingly likely Lott will go down. He's losing people like Pete Domenici, an "old bull" who might have been expected to support Lott on the grounds of Senatorial fellowship and who has a lot to lose now if Lott survives.

By my count, Lott appears to have locked up 10 votes (plus himself) and Frist the same, with two more votes highly likely. Here's the list:

LOTT VOTES

Campbell (CO)
Cochran (MS)
Hatch (UT)
Lugar (IN)
McConnell (KY)
Murkowski (AK)
Santorum (PA)
Specter (PA)
Stevens (AK)
Voinovich (OH)

There are probably other solid Lott votes I'm not counting. Here's the Frist rundown:

FRIST VOTES

Alexander (TN)
Allen (VA)
Bond (MO)
Chafee (RI)
Domenici (NM)
Enzi (WY)
Inhofe (OK)
McCain (AZ) - hates Lott, so very likely, though he hasn't said anything yet that I'm aware of
Nickles (OK)
Talent (MO)
Thomas (WY) - hasn't said anything, but rumored to be a Frist vote
Warner (VA)

If I were Frist, these would be my top targets to convert to my side: Senators close to the President (Bush wants Lott out); Senators whom Frist helped elect this year (they owe him); Senators vulnerable to a strong black voter turnout next time (voting for Lott will piss them off); Senators identified as strongly Christian (they're probably the most offended by what Lott said); and Senators identified as more liberal (they probably hate Lott the most). So here's my list of targets:

Allard (CO)
Brownback (KS)
Chambliss (GA)
Coleman (MN)
Collins (ME)
Cornyn (TX)
Dole (NC)
Graham (SC)
Grassley (IO)
Hutchinson (TX)
Kyl (AZ)
Roberts (KS)
Snow (ME)
Sununu (NH)

That gives him a couple-vote margin for victory.
posted by Noah at 11:00 AM

 
Peter Beinart thinks the right-wingers who have called for Lott's resignation still don't get it. So how does he explain letters like this?

Beinart's interesting personal history (he was raised in Africa) makes him a particularly credible liberal writer on race. And he has legitimately high standards on the topic. And yeah, the National Review editorial was not the strongest of the many statements against Lott on their website. But hey: they've been running a half-dozen anti-Lott stories a day since a couple of days after the scandal broke. They've published forceful principled attacks from the likes of David Frum and Robert George and less principled, more pragmatic attacks from the likes of Jonah Goldberg and their editorial. I have a hard time seeing how they've been soft on Lott or how they've avoided the principled stance that segregation was an unmitigated and unconscionable evil.

At the end of his piece, Beinart accuses conservatives of believing that all right-wingers are basically nice folks and all liberals are basically perfidious. I do know people who think this way - though I know plenty more who think the opposite. (Of course, most of my friends and family are basically liberals, not conservatives, so I'm not working from an unbiased sample.) But his evidence is that National Review mocks the NAACP and the NAACP despised Lott. Why does Beinart think that the NAACP is the arbiter of who is a racist and who isn't? Does he think that National Review is the arbiter of who has liberal bias and who doesn't? Does he think that CAIR is the arbiter of who is anti-Arab or anti-Muslim and who isn't? I don't think so.

Even if you thought that NAACP was the official "voice" of black America, you would be wrong to think that they were the arbiters of right and wrong with regard to the Lott affair. Lott said that the country would have been better off had the Presidency been won by a one-issue segregationist candidate. That can only mean that he thinks the effort to end segregation was wrong. That is a morally wrong viewpoint. It is unacceptable not because it offends some people but because it is an affirmation of evil.

It is not an easy thing to come from a conquered people, but it can have positive consequences on character. General MacArthur famously empathized with the Japanese under his rule because he was a Southerner, and knew what it meant to be a proud culture utterly defeated. Those in the South who have most fully reckoned with the evil legacy of white supremacy - and there are both Democrats and Republicans, including plenty of conservative Republicans, in their ranks - are the most credible white spokesmen on the subject of race in America. Lott is not one of them. He is so much not one of them that he has, still, no idea of the serious wrong in what he said - I agree with the first half of Beinart's editorial without reservation. But the record should show that some of the angriest responses to Lott's statement came from the political right - from people like Bill Kristol and David Frum who believe in Republican Party principles, believe that Dixiecrat principles are their diametric opposite in every way, and will not stand for having the two confused by having a Dixiecrat nostalgist as the leader of the Republican Senate.
posted by Noah at 6:28 PM

 
We'll put Turkey in NAFTA, bring in Britain, Poland, Czechia and Israel for good measure, then we buy Greenland for good measure. Come on out with your hands up, Eurocrats - we've got you surrounded!
posted by Noah at 1:00 PM

 
Jim Bennett (link via Instapundit) thinks we should take Ankara up on its threat to Brussels and extend an invitation to Turkey to join NAFTA.

An excellent idea. I've been arguing for some time: we don't want the Eurozone to grow on the notion that it will thereby be diluted and less of a threat. We want it compact and manageable so that it can still function as an ally (if it remains one) and so that more solid allies (like Britain and Turkey) are not restrained from supporting America by their membership in the EU.

I think extending an invitation to, say, the Czech Republic to join NAFTA would change the politics of EU expansion suddenly and dramatically. Here's a simple illustration: the Czechs ask why they can't join both NAFTA and the EU, and have favorable trade terms with both regions. We say, why not? The EU says: unacceptable; once you join the EU, Brussels decides what trade terms you have with the outside world. How likely do you think the proud peoples of Eastern Europe will be to sign up for EU membership when the threat to their hard-won sovereignty by so joining is made so starkly manifest?

We should not be pressuring Brussels to let Turkey into the EU. We should simply do the following: tell our Turkish allies they are welcome into NAFTA, and tell Brussels that we will not allow NATO troops (i.e. Turkish ones) to be placed under non-NATO command (i.e. the EU "rapid reaction" force) without the contributing country's express permission (unlikely to be forthcoming after being so snubbed by the Eurocrats). Let Brussels try to build its super-state without our - or the Turks' - help.
posted by Noah at 12:58 PM

 
Well, we've lost another election to anti-Americanism: South Korea picks liberal Roh for president. The positive side to this is that Roh is going to be more serious about reforming the chaebol (though less serious about reforming the labor unions) than Lee would have been. But the election was primarily about relations with the North, and the Koreans appear to have narrowly voted to plant their heads firmly in the sand and hope the Dear Leader has no nasty plans for them. It's the German election all over again.

The most pessimistic view now would be: the alliance with South Korea is going to end. If South Koreans believe that the North is not their mortal enemy, they will not tolerate American troops on their soil. South Korea could be rapidly Finlandized, kicking out the Americans, indulging in anti-Japanese nationalism and relying on China and on payments of wergeld to keep the North's most aggressive impulses in check. Even if South Korea doesn't move affirmatively in this direction, it could be pushed there by the North. If North Korea becomes a declared nuclear power and continues to take actions directly hostile to American interests, while reassuring the South of its benevolent and brotherly feelings towards them, the U.S. will be in a real bind. We cannot take action against the North without cooperation from the South unless we are willing to completely sunder our relationship with South Korea. How, for example, could we threaten war against Pyongyang if they threaten to retaliate against Seoul and Seoul is not in our corner? And as President Bush argued almost a year ago, North Korea is truly part of the axis of evil, the essential supplier of missile and nuclear technology to a host of dangerous regimes that are our primary targets in the current war.

The Korean Penninsula is a huge problem. We need to bring the leadership of the reformist, liberal parties around to supporting the American alliance. We need to convince them that the North is a clear and present danger, and they need to tell their people that the Americans are in Korea to protect them, not to rule them. This is what we have a State Department for. Is anybody home?

I'm beginning to really worry that this Administration can't juggle all the international problems it has to deal with at once.
posted by Noah at 11:58 AM

 
Another excellent Diary from David Frum on the Lott implosion. I'm so happy he's got this new perch. I enjoyed his book on the 1970s, but I'm enjoying even more this daily dose of his moral and practical intelligence.
posted by Noah at 10:55 AM

 
Well, the LMDC has unveiled the new plans for the WTC. I blogged a detailed response to the last round of plans here. What do I think of the new round?

They're horrible. I tried to give these guys the benefit of the doubt last time. I'm not going to give it to them this time.

Supposedly, people were upset that the first round of designs wasn't bold enough. Which is fair; the buildings were short, dumpy and crowded together. The three good ideas to emerge from the planning were: recreate as much of the street grid as possible; build a promenade over West Street culminating in a park on part of the site; and build a major transit hub including subways, PATH train, and ideally LIRR and Metro North trains. No good ideas for actual buildings emerged.

So what have our architectural innovators delivered for the second round? You wanted bold? We'll give you arrogant. You wanted big? We'll give you monstrous. These are unquestionably some of the ugliest building designs I've ever seen. They would permanently disfigure the lower-Manhattan skyline. They are terrifying, out of scale sculptural notions that no one could love or feel at home in. They are designed to crush humanity beneath their awesome weight. They are everything bad about the WTC and nothing of the good - all the grossness and inhumanity, none of the elegance and simplicity. And the memorials are soul-destroying and meaningless. They are the opposite of what we need.

I'm somewhat at a loss to say which design is the worst. Meier's Borg-like grid? United Architects' mass of towers collapsing into one another? SOM's rendition of the world's largest Blue Man Group pipe organ? It's a tough call. Only professional architects of world-class caliber could come up with designs so patently awful.

THINK delivers three designs, none of them remotely good, but none of them quite so horrifying that one wants to have them banned from ever competing in such a forum again for fear of the damage they would do if they were ever allowed to build something. All three designs are banal colossi, either office towers or erector-set atriums. If these fellows went to work on simpler, smaller projects, some day they might be ready to tackle a big and important project like this one. Foster & Partners delivers a similarly banal and similarly awful scheme of twinned collapsing towers (the designers seem to think they are kissing) and gaping holes in the ground as a "memorial" - to what, I have no idea. I have never seen a more depressing grave. Then there's Daniel Libeskind's Studio, whose plans are, I admit, completely incomprehensible to me, a jumble of jagged edges and asymmetric walls of glass.

And then, the one exception to the horror. Peterson/Littenberg's design at least involves buildings that look like buildings. They've got bottoms and tops, they taper, they've got a bit of detailing - they are classically designed skyscrapers. They've incorporated the West Street promenade idea from the best of the first-round designs for the area. The layout of the buildings and of the parkland is mostly intelligent and humanist. I would quibble with having the park where the promenade terminates cut off from the central square by a row of buildings, but that is, as I say, a quibble. The biggest disappointment is that the buildings lack any overarching stylistic theme such as unites Rockerfeller Center into a coherent whole. If they executed this design, it would enhance the city and not damage it irreparably the way the other designs would. But there would be an opportunity lost.

Allow me, then, to remind everyone of Fred Turner's intelligent design for a new twin towers, one that would harmonize with the surrounding buildings and with the Brooklyn Bridge in a really elegant way. I've proposed my own emendations to his original concept, but I want to urge him to get in touch with the folks at Peterson and Littenberg, obviously the only firm in the competition to care about the city more than about who can lay the biggest turd on its prime real estate. Perhaps he could push them a bit in his direction.

I fear for the future of my city, people. I really do.
posted by Noah at 5:57 PM

 
Okay, I'm bored and running a simulation that will take a while. Let's play the most boring game in politics: handicapping the 7 dwarves.

We last saw these critters in 1988. Then, they were Babbitt, Biden, Dukakis, Gephardt, Gore, Hart and Simon. (Oh, Jesse Jackson ran that year, too - same in second - but I don't think we're allowed to refer to him as a vertically-challenged individual.) Dukakis, the hobbittiest of the bunch, took the palm that year. This year, with Gore out of the running, the dwarves number at least seven yet again: Daschle, Dean, Edwards, Gephardt, Kerry, Lieberman, Sharpton are considered most-likely to run, with potential appearances by '88 alums Biden and Hart (!) as well. How do they rate? And who is playing whom?

Daschle is playing Gephardt. The Dems are different now than they were then; there's less room for a Gephardt '88 run of forthright economic nationalism and middle-of-the-road stances on social issues. But Gephardt ran as the boring party leader type that he was and Daschle will be running as that this time. If he runs. Which I think he won't, 'cause he'll poll terribly.

I don't know anything about Howard Dean, and I don't need to. Dean is playing Babbitt (who in turn was playing Udall): the nice nobody whom everyone basically likes and thinks is a decent person but who doesn't have a prayer of winning.

Edwards is playing Gore. There's a notion current in The New Republic and other bastions of Gore-worship that Gore ran in 1988 as Scoop Jackson: a firm anti-Communist believer in a moral foreign policy and a traditional New Deal Democrat message on domestic issues. He didn't. He ran as a Southern moderate. He was pro-tobacco and tried to finesse the whole batch of "social issues" that loom ever larger in Democratic ranks: abortion, guns, death penalty, etc. His history in foreign policy matters was to develop tactical responses to the GOP that seemed reasonably "pro-defense." His record was similar on social and economic issues. Edwards will be playing the same game this year: young, fresh face, and culturally credible for a general election because he's from the South, but with no really unique message of his own to deliver other than his moderation. I continue to predict, however, that Edwards will not run, or that if he does he will quit early, before Super Tuesday. It's too expensive a game to play for fun, and he knows he's a long-shot to win, if only because he's got nothing to run on yet. Also, he's going to have to work hard to defend his Senate seat in '04; if he loses that, he's out of the game altogether. He's gonna wait until '08.

Gephardt is not playing any of the Democrats who ran in 1988. He is playing Bob Dole circa 1988, and predict he'll do as well: win in Iowa, lose in New Hampshire, then fade to black after Super-Tuesday. His conversion to muscular foreign policy on Iraq will not win him any primary votes, and even if it could I don't think he'd be terribly convincing as a spokesman for a hawkish foreign policy. He'll do decently because of his union support, but it won't be enough.

Kerry is, in many ways, playing Dukakis. He's a "card-carrying" liberal from Massachusetts who compares himself to John Kennedy and has a nutty wife. He will likely run a strong campaign and become increasingly credible as rivals fall away. But he bears some similarities to other Democratic candidates of the past. He resembles Hart in his messianic self-regard and his personal recklessness (in Kerry's case, this is expressed in dare-deviltry rather than in womanizing). He resembles Gore in his lack of human touch. But he's not running on new ideas and he won't be running as a moderate trimmer. (Then again, this race won't be about new ideas; the Democrats aren't convinced at all that they need new ideas.) So mostly I think he's Dukakis. I maintain that Kerry's the front-runner: he's got the money, he's got the message, he's got a semi native-son thing in New Hampshire and a strong organization in South Carolina, and there is no credible Clinton/Carter moderate in the race who can take the nomination away from him. If his personality doesn't cause him to self-destruct, he's my bet to be the nominee. If he doesn't, I retroactively change my view that he's playing an amalgam of Dukakis and Hart; instead, he's playing Biden. Biden's the one Dukakis was most worried about early in the campaign. Then his weird personality caused the campaign to self-destruct. It could just as easily have been Dukakis' weird personality to cause his campaign to self-destruct, in which case it's entirely possible that Biden would be a footnote to history instead.

The New Republic desperately wants Joe Lieberman to run for President because he's the only Democrat to full-throatedly support war in Iraq, and the staff of TNR is still voting for the late Scoop Jackson. But if Lieberman runs, he'll be running as Paul Simon: another decent fellow whom everyone likes and everyone thinks would make a great veep, if not quite a President, but whom not enough people will vote for. Lieberman is, of course, well to the right of where Simon was in 1988. But he won't run that way, because he's going to want to win. He is not going to lead a revolt in Democratic ranks, and if he did he would lose and lose badly. But running as a mainstream Democrat, Lieberman will be less convincing than if he ran an issue-oriented campaign designed to shake up the party rather than win. Lieberman is not trusted by unions, or minority pressure groups, or the feminist lobby. He could pander to these folks to get them onboard if he was likely to win, but he's going to be a long-shot from the start so why would they go for him instead of someone with a record they like better? The enviros like him, of course, but they like Kerry just as well. The insurance and pharmaceutical companies who bankroll his Senate campaigns will be exposed as a liability in the primary, and again, there are other candidates who are sufficiently business-friendly that they'll be able to raise money: Kerry in particular will have little trouble in this area. If Lieberman really throws himself into the contest, he could do as well as Paul Tsongas did in 1992, and expose the fact that a significant minority of Democrats are worried enough about Iraq to want the party to have a more muscular stance, just as Tsongas exposed the fact that a significant minority of Democrats worried enough about the deficit to want some restraint on spending. But it's a minority. Lieberman is Simon: nice, clean, well-regarded, and doomed to lose this race.

That's the list. Right?

Oh yeah, Sharpton will be playing Jackson. I wouldn't call the first time tragedy, but the second time will definitely be farce. The only question is: how much damage will he do to the Dems? Donna Brazile is now encouraging black officeholders from Southern states to run as "favored sons" in every Southern primary, to encourage black voters to vote for them rather than for Sharpton. The practical impact of this, of course, is that black voters will have no influence at all on the choice of nominee. Interesting that Brazile, a black woman who worked for Gore and Dukakis, would advocate such a strategy. One of these days, the angry black vote is going to make the national Democrats as hopelessly ungovernable an organization as the New York Democrats. Sharpton is the man to make it happen. Can he do it this year? I vote no - but I'd be foolish to bet on it.

So that's my prediction of the race, based on the current players. Gephardt wins Iowa, Kerry wins New Hampshire, Lieberman, Edwards (if he runs) and Sharpton hang on through South Carolina and maybe through Super-Tuesday. If Kerry wins South Carolina by putting together a coalition of Democrat vets and black voters, he puts it away early. If not, and Lieberman or Edwards wins it, we've got more of a horse-race, but I still think Kerry pulls it out in the end. If Sharpton wins any primaries, the party will begin to

posted by Noah at 5:46 PM

 
Oh, and Derb's other recent column - his year-end reading list - is equally excellent. I'll be following up later with some comments and suggestions of my own.
posted by Noah at 1:04 PM

 
Okay - back at work and everything has fallen apart while I was gone. What else is new. At least I was able to get here, a transit strike having been averted at the last minute.

So: lots to catch up on. For now, let me point to two recent pieces by John Derbyshire.

The first: about China, something John knows a great deal about and I know almost nothing about. He notes that one thing the China-boosters and China-Cassandras agree upon is the central importance of China to the future of the world and to America. He politely disputes this assessment of China's centrality, and compares the country to Mexico, predicting a slow, fitful advance towards modernity, with periodic bouts of madness and endemic corruption, but no massive threat to anyone.

I think he has a great point. But I think he's got the wrong analogy, because Mexico has never been a significant military power, which China looks likely to be. If Mexico had 5 million men under arms and nuclear weapons, I rather think we would have been more concerned about their revolution than we were.

The standard line on China is that it is like pre-WWI Germany: the rising power out to knock the dominant power (Britain vs. Germany, America vs. China) out of the rising power's self-defined sphere of influence. They share other similarities: extreme nationalism, rapid modernization, an emphasis on technical expertise, etc. I've often thought that another reasonable analogy was pre-WWII Japan: a society that had also undergone rapid industrialization and modernization and reacted with extreme nationalism and military adventurism. Japan, moreover, was still a very poor and in many ways primitive country on the eve of WWII, as is China today, and neither had a very sophisticated cultural understanding of the adversary they intended to displace.

But perhaps a better analogy yet is to pre-WWI Russia. Russia had undergone rapid modernization and industrialization, but was still a largely rural and backward country on the even of WWI. Its population had grown immensely in the previous century, and many Europeans feared that if Russia succeeded in becoming a modern power it would overwhelm all other European states by virtue of its sheer bulk. Russia then, like China now, was ruled by an absolutist authoritarian ideology and was fitfully trying to modernize its political institutions while retaining heavy censorship and a massive secret police. Russia in the years before WWI was wracked by labor unrest, peasant uprisings, revolutionary movements, and so forth. China looks rather different on the last score, but not so different on the first two. On this analogy, Tiananmen was roughly equivalent to the 1905 revolution.

Does this mean China is headed for revolution? No. The October Revolution in Russia was highly contingent, and would never have happened were it not for World War I. There is no equivalent to the Bolsheviks waiting to seize power in China. Nor does it mean that China is about to emerge as a volatile and dangerous superpower analogous to the Soviet Union. The Soviets themselves would never have achieved anything like their degree of power and success were it not for World War II, which eliminated their major enemies and gave them enormous new territories and resources. But I do think that the immediate future of China is volatile, and that this poses serious challenges to America's interests far in excess of those posed by the Mexican Revolution.
posted by Noah at 1:03 PM

 
Blogging from my mother-in-law's house, so this'll be short. First, many thanks to John Podhoretz and John Derbyshire for their respective mentions of the site and for their praise thereof. Second, my apologies to all the new readers they sent my way that I have posted nothing new since Thursday. Blame my mother-in-law. I'll be back later this week, so hopefully some of y'all will come back.
posted by Noah at 12:29 PM

 
Paul Cella sends me a link to a piece by Fred Reed about how freedom and self-reliance ultimately and naturally evolves into conformity and subjugation. He laments the loss of the world of the rugged yeoman farmer and the arrival of the world of the highly-regulated suburb.

Ah, phooey. As I blogged last month (more recycling!) in discussing the "master-narratives" that animate this country's two major parties, there's a basic dispute at the heart of the American story about what constitutes freedom. Jefferson thought freedom meant being an independent yeoman. But your typical yeoman farmer was crushed by debt and a slave to the land; farming was and is some of the hardest, least profitable work there is, and it gives you no vacation. The only ones who were really "free" were the planter class of gentlemen farmers, and their lifestyle was underwritten by slavery. Although Hamilton is the one usually opposed to Jefferson, he's not a great exponent on the meaning of freedom. Rather, the man who articulated a different idea of what freedom meant was the founder of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln. In his view, freedom meant getting off the damned farm, getting yourself some education and going to the city to make your fortune. Freedom meant not owning and working one's own plot of land but climbing the steep and slippery slope to prosperity and accomplishment, and the best way to do that was in the marketplace and in the city.

I think both these visions of freedom are valid, though my own interests and concerns incline me to Lincoln's vision rather than Jefferson's. But the story Reed recounts, of the closing of the frontier, is over 100 years old. This land is settled. You want to homestead on prime real estate? Get on the bandwagon for terraforming Mars. After all, what opened the frontier in the first place for all those rugged individualists was the combination of the British Navy and the American Army. If the 22nd Century enjoys a renaissance of rugged individualism, it'll be because of the combination of the U.S. Air and Space Force and the kinds of multi-national corporations that Reed complains about.
posted by Noah at 11:51 AM

 
David Frum has another excellent Diary, on two subjects: how expensive in policy terms it will be for the GOP to keep Lott as Majority Leader, and how America suffers because it does not appreciate its allies sufficiently. I've blogged on the latter topic before, in the context of a critique of an article about how to deal with North Korea. Here's the key bit (recycling my own stuff is so efficient!):

America has forgotten how to have allies. We have gotten used to thinking of our allies as dependencies, and this has corrupted our relations with them. The Left thinks they are dependencies, and is embarrassed, and so wants us to defer to them, restrain our power, subject ourselves to international institutions where one state has one vote regardless of the relative natures (free or unfree) or power (weak or strong) of the regimes in question. The Right thinks they are dependencies, and expects them to heel, and obey their master. These are both terribly wrong attitudes, and are getting us into more and more trouble.

We do not want weak allies. We want strong allies. Strong allies must be reckoned with in their own right; they cannot be counted on simply to follow our leader. Of course, we will aspire to remain by a fair margin the strongest among our allies as among our enemies. We shall seek to remain the dominant power. But we cannot defend all of our common interests that we share with our allies without our allies' active and vigorous support. Our position on Iraq is weaker than it might be because European nations - who are more threatened than we by the rise of radical Islam - are trying to avoid their responsibilities as they did in the Balkans. Our position on North Korea is weaker than it might be because Japan - who is more threatened than we by a nuclear armed lunatic in Pyongyang - prefers not to assert itself in its own defense, and leaves us seeming silly should we try to assert ourselves in their stead. We need allies who are strong and vigorous, who assert themselves against us some of the time even as they understand that their most important relationship is with the world's superpower, because allies who do not do this are unlikely to be useful to us when we need them.

Here's a good rule of thumb for public diplomacy: assume your audience is patriotic. Assume the Frenchmen you are trying to reach want to do what's best for France, the Germans for Germany, the Turks for Turkey. You're not going to reach someone fundamentally in the grip of ressentiment and anti-Americanism. You could win, or lose, support of geniune patriots. So address them as patriots, and as a patriot. Treat them with dignity and appreciation and with honesty - which doesn't mean adjusting your views of America's national interest in order to avoid ruffling their feathers, but does mean articulating America's national interest in a way that makes it clear that our interests are common. When Bush says that the terrorists have maps of Europe as well as of America, he's making a good and important point in the right way. Ditto when he says that if the U.N. does not enforce its binding resolutions, then it makes itself irrelevant. Couple points like that with appreciation for the genuine contribution of Canadians, Europeans, and others to our common war effort - not America's war, but a war of civilization against barbarism - and you've got a decent foundation for public diplomacy with respect to the war on terror.

Of course, public diplomacy needs to be backed up by substance. America needs to be willing to sacrifice some parochial interests for the sake of the larger common interest. We need Mexico's help in securing our Southern border. We need Canada's help in securing our Northern border. Those interests should have an impact on how forthcoming we are on issues that might divide us - for example, on Mexican trucks and Canadian lumber. We're playing a lot of politics with economic policy right now. Pity we're not playing diplomacy instead.
posted by Noah at 11:10 AM

 
Returning to the theme of Senator Lott. I've got to say, all the conservative and Republican opinionators whom I respect most have gotten this story right, if they have weighed in on the subject. It's a long list and spans the spectrum from theo-con to neo-con to libertarian. Too bad Republican Senators haven't done the same.

It is now too late for the GOP to get out of this without damage. Had there been immediate and fierce reaction from within Republican ranks, the whole thing would have been a net-positive for the GOP. Imagine if Tom Delay had said that he was offended, that such sentiments have no place in the GOP, and that Lott must explain himself adequately and convincingly if he is to be an effective party leader going forward. Attacks on Delay - and GOP ultras more generally - would have been far less credible in the future. But the outcry was primarily from conservative pundits and pressure groups, not from elected officials or members of the Administration. And the result is that if Lott goes now, it will appear to be an act of politics, not principle. If he stays, of course, it'll be a disaster. And the longer this plays out, the harder it will be to make him leave.

Jonah Goldberg and others have suggested that this will play out equally badly for Democrats and Republicans, or that Democrats have just as big a problem as Republicans in this area. Wrong on both counts. Daschle may be in trouble with Maxine Waters, but that's not what matters. What matters is that marginal white voters will be more reluctant to pull the lever for the GOP in the next election, and black voters will be energized to vote Democrat. All of Gore's campaign slogans from 2000 that were used to fire up the black base will be more effective next time, not less. And Robert Byrd may indeed be as much of a closet segregationist as Lott. But he is not the Democrats' majority leader. There are plenty of black voters who think the Democrats take them for granted and give them a raw deal. Lott just reminded them that there's no alternative. Think that hurts the Dems? Think again.

I supported a number of GOP candidates in the last election cycle. I've written to those who made it to the Senate to urge them strongly to oppose Senator Lott's election to Majority Leader in the next Congress. I've also written to the national GOP to explain that I will not support the national party so long as Lott is Majority Leader. I'll continue to support individual candidates that I approve of, whether they are Republicans or Democrats. But I will not support the national party.

This is not the Confederate Flag, a very emotional issue that anyone other than blacks and Southern whites opine on at their peril. This is certainly not something like affirmative action where Republicans can take a principled stance that is opposed by most black Americans. Lott's comments are not subject to a variety of plausible interpretations. He said it would have been better if the Dixiecrats won in 1948. That either means that he regrets the demise of segregation, or that he is too stupid to understand what he said. Either way, he is unqualified to serve as Majority Leader. The best outcome would be for Lott to resign under pressure from his colleagues in the House and Senate. Second best would be for President Bush to quietly push him aside. Third best would be for President Bush to publicly repudiate and humiliate him. Worst would be for him to remain.
posted by Noah at 10:56 AM

 
Ha'aretz compares Sharon to Golda Meir. It's an interesting (and amusing) comparison! But the final paragraph is confusing:

American columnist William Safire wrote recently that Limor Livnat is the "next Golda Meir." He is wrong: Sharon has already taken the part. Golda and Sharon did not share the same background; nor did the two get along. But both reached the top at advanced ages and had similar perspectives. Like Meir, Sharon is wary of any compromise with the Arabs; like Meir, Sharon believes that having an understanding with the U.S. suffices to avoid concessions, win elections, and enjoy public support. At least in one of these two cases, these beliefs produced a national catastrophe.

The catastrophe referred to is the Yom Kippur War. But in what sense were Prime Minister Meir's objections to concessions the cause of that war? Is it plausible that the Arab states - which rejected any recognition of Israel after 1967 - would have been more forthcoming if Meir had continued the conciliatory line of the Eshkol government? If there is a left-wing case to be made for Israel failing to "grasp the olive branch" it is in the wake of '79, not in the period before '73. You can make the argument that, after the peace with Egypt, a serious attempt to construct an autonomous region in the West Bank and Gaza would have brought a lasting end to the conflict. (The right-wing response to this is that such an attempt was impossible so long as the PLO was able to wipe out elements open to conciliation, and that therefore the real missed opportunity was in '82, in letting Arafat escape from Lebanon.)

The Yom Kippur war was a catastrophe, yes: a catastrophe caused by Israeli over-confidence and intelligence failure after the massive victory in '67. If Ha'aretz wants to argue that the Sharon government is being insufficiently vigilant against, say, the potential of a massive attack from the North, or Egypt abrogating the security provisions of its peace with Israel, or an Iraqi Scud attack, they should make that case.

I thought not.
posted by Noah at 10:15 AM

 
So now Amram Mitzna says he's in the moderate center. Does that mean he'll join a Sharon-led coalition government, if asked? 'Cause he'll be asked.

What has Mitzna accomplished so far in his campaign to revive Labor? He failed to satisfy the doctrinaire leftists who, though a minority in the party, are among its most vocal members. So now those leftists are decamping for Meretz. I count that as a positive. So long as Beilin was a power in the party, the party could not join a national unity government. And a Labor party unwilling to join a unity government is one that has not come to terms with the fact that the P.A. has declared war on Israel. In war, you close ranks. If Labor can't see that, they are no longer fit to govern.

He has had warm words for Shas and hostile words for Shinui. That's not likely to win Shinui voters over to Labor - and these are the voters, not the Meretz leftists, that Labor most win if it is to ever have a chance of running the country again. Mitzna is acting precisely like Labor leaders in the past: assuming that a majority will come, and trying to keep fences open to "3rd parties" so he can build a government after the election. Labor should be adopting the Shinui platform, not criticizing it. How many Haredim vote Labor anyhow?

Mind you, I think Shinui has some evolving to do. It would have been much better had Meimad joined up with Shinui rather than Labor for this election. Had it done so, Shinui would have gotten a boost and Meimad would have done a real national service, helping to make clear that an emerging liberal party is not anti-religious but anti- a corrupt religious establishment. Yes, this would have required a certain amount of compromise on Shinui's part, something they are not known for. And that would also have been good: if Shinui could not come to terms with Meimad, then we would all know that it has no intention of being a major party, but is a pure protest vehicle. On the other hand, if it had come to terms with them, it would have taken a major step forward - and, incidentally, become the natural default partner for Labor in government, and a potential partner for Likud.

Mitzna was chosen by Labor because he was a new face, untainted by the squabbling of his predecessors. But he looks increasingly just like Barak (also a new face in his day). He is building the same coalition, around the same issues, on the same basis. He wants to attract the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox, not the angry secularists who are building a viable alternative to Labor. He wants to attract the Arab vote, not realizing that since 1999 the Arab vote has been radically alienated - and those who have not been alienated, like the Druze, are increasingly voting Likud. He has learned absolutely nothing from the Oslo War; he would still negotiate with Arafat, and if negotiations failed he would still withdraw unilaterally - precisely Barak's strategy in the territories and in Lebanon, and precisely what brought us to where we are today.

Israel is headed towards either a one-party system or a no-party system. If Sharon keeps the Likud from flying off in a radical-right direction, Likud will be the majority party for a generation. If he fails, there will be no party capable of governing the country. Because Labor has learned nothing from its failures.
posted by Noah at 5:49 PM

 
Okay, here's how I get to find out if I have any readers out there. We're coming up to the end of the year, which means: there's only a few weeks left to give to your favorite charities and have it count for this year's taxes. I'm going to take this opportunity to highlight some of my favorite charities, and I invite my few readers to email me their suggestions.

These are not in any way in order of importance, or in any other order. I've numbered them just for ease of reading. In some cases, there's even more than one charity mentioned per numbered paragraph. So sue me.

If you've been reading the papers, you're surely aware that it's tougher than it used to be to be Jewish and "out" about it on many campuses today. That makes it all the more important for Jewish students to have a place on campus to call home. Usually, that place is funded and run by Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. Hillel is one of the most effective Jewish organizations around (I know that's not saying much, but still). College is a time when young people are exploring their values; for the first time out from under the aegis of their parents, they get exposed (we hope) to many conflicting ideas about how to live. It's vital that there be a center of Jewish values and life in the lists competing with the other voices.

One of the most horrible things about war in the past century has been: it is increasingly waged against civilians. And one of the most dramatic and devastating consequence of recent wars has been an avalanche of refugee crises. The leading private institution responding to these crises is the International Rescue Committee. This charity has gotten a whole lot bigger in the past 10 years, and it has a lot of prominent supporters. But it's gotten bigger because the demand is enormous. The IRC has always focused on using local people where possible, and on resettlement in the region or elsewhere - the focus is on getting communities functioning again as quickly and sustainably as possible. This is an area that is fraught with political danger; the Hutu genocidaire infiltration of refugee camps in central Africa and the terrorist takeover of Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and the rest of the territories are extreme examples of the problems with helping refugees. But the IRC does a pretty good job of navigating these minefields, and not being politicized the way, say, Doctors Without Borders is. They do good work in the worst places on earth. And Lord knows, there's a lot of work to be done.

When you support an organization whose product is ideas, you're leveraging your dollars, because these ideas will, if they are good ones and well-communicated, get picked up elsewhere in the public and non-profit sectors. I have a hard time coming up with the name of a think-tank that has had a more dramatic impact on policies I care about than the Manhattan Institute. More than any other organization, this was the incubator for ideas like welfare reform, broken-windows policing - the whole host of policy innovations that changed the urban landscape in the 1990s. Since before September 11th, but with more intense focus since then, they have been forceful advocates for intelligent plans to rebuild the city and liberate its economy. They are, so far as I know, the only right-leaning think-tank focused on urban issues, but their mandate is broader than that. They are now doing battle on the home front in the war on terror, working with police departments around the country to design a database and communication tool for preventing and responding to terrorism modelled on the COMPSTAT system used to great effect in fighting crime in New York. They're also increasingly their profile in Latin America. They are a rare think-tank that is also a do-tank, and the work they are doing has changed and continues to change the fate of urban America.

I've reviewed their work before, and will do so again, as every year my wife and I travel to Canada to take in the theatrical wonders of the Stratford Festival. Located about an hour west of Toronto, Stratford is (apart from its name) an unlikely place to find the premier classical theater company in the Western Hemisphere. But I travel up from New York City - reputed to have something of a theatrical reputation in its own right - for a reason. I am an unabashed bardolator, but even if you aren't you must concede that without Shakespeare, there is no literary tradition, and no theatrical tradition, at least in English. And mercifully, Stratford's productions are largely free of the post-toasty garbledigook, pop-culture referencing and celebrity pandering that overwhelms so many productions at, say, the Public Theater in New York. They put on great plays (mostly; they do many non-Shakespearean productions, and not all of them are wonderful), with great, classically-trained actors, on a world-famous and influential thrust stage, and they do it every year on a grand scale. And they are training future generations of classically-trained actors at the Stratford Conservatory for Classical Training. Some people fight the culture wars by complaining about the cultural decline. Going to, and supporting the Stratford Festival is one way to fight the culture wars with culture.

It's a cliche: give a man a fish, and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and feed him for life. On the international scene, there's one unique organization focused on teaching the fishermen of the future in some of the poorest countries on earth: Technoserve, the charity with probably the dumbest name in the history of philanthropy. Technoserve's mission is to help fledgeling entrepreneurs in the world's poorest countries how to build sustainable businesses, make connections with the global economy, and succeed. They help entrepreneurs with simple capital improvements that make a world of difference in productivity, typically at low cost to Technoserve but overcoming enormous transaction costs that the entrepreneurs would face by themselves. (For example: enabling west-African peanut-butter makers to buy food-processors, which cut the time of producing peanut-butter enormously.) The people who run the organization are typically well-connected businessmen, frequently involved in agriculture, who can offer practical advice and assistance to nascent capitalists. And that's part of the key to their success: they are not trying to change the global economy or fight globalization; they are trying to help poor entrepreneurs plug into that economy and benefit from globalization.

Speaking of capitalism: any believer in freedom and private property will tell you that you take care of what's yours better than you take care of what belongs to someone else - or to no one. That's why my favorite environmental organization is the one that believes in protecting wilderness the old-fashioned way: they buy it. I'm talking about the Nature Conservancy. I've heard people decline to give to them on the grounds that they are already rich. But if you believe in their approach, the richer they are the more you should give to them, because their assets are a measure of their success in acquiring and protecting wilderness areas. Of course, they don't only buy land. They also run a huge scientific enterprise to catalog the biological assets of the land they own, and to identify target areas for conservation. They work with businesses and governments to protect areas beyond the scope of the Conservancy's resources to purchase and protect on their own, to extract economic value from protected areas through science and eco-tourism, to work on environmental questions that extend beyond the mandate of protecting wilderness areas. But in all their efforts, they are guided by a strict attention to solid science and a commitment to working with local communities, governments and businesses, not engaging in ideological warfare with them.

A puzzling trend over the past couple of decades has been the dramatic explosion of respiratory ailments and allergies. It's particularly puzzling since air quality has improved and smoking has declined over this period. One of the leading research institution dedicated to this area of medicine is the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Colorado. They've been rated the top respiratory hospital in America by US News and World Report for each of the past 5 years. Everyone has their own favorite medical charity, usually related to a loved one who suffered from or died from a disease or condition; on my case, I was attracted to National Jewish in part because pulminology was my late brother-in-law's specialty. But be that as it may: they are an impressive organization doing work in a field of growing importance.

On a more parochial note: there are any number of ways to show support for Israel in its time of trial. Three that I would strongly endorse are: the Libi Fund, which provides benefits of various kinds for needy Israeli veterans; Magen David Adom, the Israeli branch of the Red Cross (which has been denied full status within the Red Cross organization for using the Jewish star as a symbol, which one Red Cross functionary compared to using a swastika); and the Israel Crisis Center, which counsels victims of terrorism. Needless to say, these worthy organizations have had too much work of late.

On a far more parochial note: readers of this blog have probably figured out that I am a Conservative Jew who is not fully observant but who has a lot of sympathy for Modern Orthodoxy. One of the leading institutions of Modern Orthodoxy, and one that I have supported, is Ohr Torah Stone, the collection of educational institutions run by Rav Shlomo Riskin. Rav Riskin was the spiritual leader of Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan for many years before moving to Efrat to found Ohr Torah Stone. Riskin has taken a lead role in struggles to sustain the Modern Orthodox promise of a traditional Jewish outlook unafraid of and in harmony with modernity. He has been a leader in bringing women into full involvement in traditional Jewish communal life. And, most important, he has built an institution that has had and will have a major role in training the Jewish leaders of tomorrow: rabbis, communal leaders, and so forth. His graduates are comfortable in the most traditional settings and in the most modern ones. And they have spent time on the front lines of the struggle for Jewish communal survival; Efrat is in Judea, within the "consensus" of areas that the vast majority of Israelis (including Ehud Barak in his plan for a Palestinian state) expect and demand to be annexed to Israel as part of any negotiated settlement. That consensus, of course, does not extend to Israel's enemies, who have taken their toll on Efrat, a town that once had very good relations with its Arab neighbors, and now sadly cannot.

Finally, a small organization with a big idea you thought was obsolete: iAbolish, formerly the American Anti-Slavery Group. Slavery, outlawed in the West for about a century and a half, is still practiced widely in parts of Africa. And the true dimensions of modern slavery are more extensive than that: extending to the trade in sexual slaves that is a growing plague Europe and America and is already widespread in Asia. The re-emergence of wide-scale traffic in human beings is one of the more indefensible of the emerging horrors of the new century. The fight to end it - which begins, but does not end, in the gruesome war waged against the Christians of the southern Sudan - is a major humanitarian and moral challenge for our time. These good folks have been leaders in drawing our attention to it.

That's my list - not comprehensive, but a start. I'm open for additional suggestions.
posted by Noah at 6:01 PM

 
Re: Likud elections, I think it matters not a whit how many ultra-hawks got to the top of the Likud list. Sharon won the primary - decisively. Mofaz is not a particularly popular figure and the other names mentioned - like Sharon's son Omri - have no popular following at all. Why shouldn't people with their own constituencies - like Livna, HaNegbi and Landau -have done well? The one good bit of news is how poorly Moshe Feiglin did. The more I learn about his group, the more alarming it seems. His relationship to Likud is comparable to David Duke's relationship to the GOP. Thankfully, it looks like he's still utterly marginal.
posted by Noah at 1:07 PM

 
David Frum,by the way, thinks the GOP can keep Lott if he apologizes abjectly. To which one can only say: what good would he be then? He'll have admitted making comments that were absolutely out of bounds politically. The proper contrition for such acts would be to resign. An apology short of resignation is necessarily short of the required apology.

posted by Noah at 10:21 AM

 
Okay, I'm the last person in the blogosphere to weigh in on Trent Lott's comments. (I'm not even going to both to link to any other blog's comments; pick one at random.)

I have hated Lott since before he became Majority Leader. He's awful on every count: morally, ideologically, politically, you name it. His history of flirtation with the worst relics of Mississippi's white-supremacist past is well-documented. His love of pork is far less odious morally but equally well attested and poses similar political problems. If his affinity for the days of segregation is an embarrassment to a Republican Party officially in favor of equal opportunity, his affinity for protectionism, subsidy and outright payoffs to favored local constituencies is an embarrassment to a Republican Party officially in favor of free enterprise and against government command of the economy.

That's a pretty damning indictment. I suppose it could all be offset if Lott was a key man to represent one or another conservative principle. Jesse Helms has a history of affinity with old-South white supremacy, as well as a history of supporting government intervention in the economy for his favored constituencies. But he stood for a key conservative principle - the defense of American sovereignty - and his country is better for his service in that area. What can Lott claim? So far as I can tell, he has never stood for anything beyond the promotion of Trent Lott's political career.

Perhaps, though I would argue not, Lott could be forgiven all this if he were a strong Majority Leader. But he's been a disaster. He catered to the vanity of Jim Jeffords, then lost him anyhow. He has been unable to frame legislative battles in a way that wins allies for the Republican side. He has always preferred to get a deal, however bad, to coming up empty, with the result that he has taken many bad deals and simultaneously lost the political debate. He's lousy at disciplining his caucus and lousy at wooing allies. The comparison with Tom Delay - not my favorite human being, but a strong legislative leader - could not be more stark. Lott can't count, can't talk, and has done basically nothing to advance Republican prospects nationally.

As for his actual comments, Strom Thurmond is indeed an extraordinary man. Extraordinary primarily if not exclusively for his longevity. I cannot think of a substantive accomplishment to which his name should be affixed. His achievement was to successfully navigate the transition from Dixiecrat par-excellence to post-Civil Rights Republican Senator of the "New South" without missing a beat or losing an election. The contrast to Truman - to whom our Republic owes a debt that is hard to measure; see my birthday appreciation here - could not be starker, and makes Lott's insult to the late President all the more gruesome. Lott is truly his heir. In a nutshell, that's why he has to be retired.

Bill Frist did a masterful job in the last elections. I'd be happy for him to replace Lott. Frankly, at this point, I'd be happy for anyone to replace Lott.

posted by Noah at 9:14 AM

 
And now, some thoughts on the brink of war.

First, if we aren't on the brink of war then the Bush Administration will go down in flames. You cannot raise the stakes as the President has with respect to Iraq and back down. He has, like it or not, placed American prestige on the line in an absolutely unequivocal manner. This is not 1962; there is no back-door way out, and the consequences of a retreat out the front door are catastrophic. I pray to G-d that the President fully understands this, because if not we are in for such trouble as we have not ever seen in this country's happy history.

Second, if war does come, it will come, as with Kossovo, without the explicit approval of the U.N., but with the tacit acceptance of the great powers. As with Kossovo, we will be breaking new ground in international law, and we don't know the ultimate consequences. Supporters of the war - and I include myself among them - have tended to downplay this aspect of things, but we probably shouldn't have, because we (well, not me, but the actual architects of the war) will be primarily responsible for dealing with those consequences. In the past, the justification for preemptive war was the rational expectation of imminent attack. The Six-Day War, begun with an Israeli preemptive strike, is a classic example. Iraq does not meet the test. Iraq is not about to attack anyone. What Iraq is, rather, is an urgent threat to international order because of the nature of the regime and its ambitions. That threat is absolutely real. But, since World War II, we have been living in a fictive world where the body responsible for handling such situations is the United Nations. The United Nations is manifestly incapable of doing so, even without the old U.S.-Soviet split rendering it impotent. As a result, NATO undertook the role of international enforcer of justice and protector of peace in Kossovo, usurping the ostensible role of the U.N. The United States - along with its NATO allies and whatever other allies we can pull together for the fight - is about to dramatically extend this usurpation to Iraq. In doing the U.N.'s job, and eliminating a criminal regime already indicted and convicted by prior U.N. resolutions, the United States will be destroying the United Nations as a world body.

I don't think I'm being overly dramatic here. The U.S. has at least four grounds for war with Iraq. First, Iraq is pursuing nuclear weapons and is an avowed enemy of America. It is in our national self-interest to prevent Iraq from achieving this capability, and stopping it means changing the regime. This is entirely legitimate from a moral and practical perspective. But it is not obviously legal. There's a good piece in Commentary (not online) walking through the justifications in law for action in Iraq, and the piece gets notably thin when it comes to justifying war on the grounds of an enemy's military buildup. We appear to be contending one of two things: either the existence of nuclear weapons in hostile hands is sufficient provocation to justify traditional preemptive war, or it justifies a new concept of preventative war. Neither is obviously provided for in traditional understanding of international law. Second, Iraq is guilty of collaboration in the September 11 attacks. That would be neat, but our government has refused to pursue this line of attack with any vigor, which presumably means there is no hard evidence of collaboration. Third, Iraq has directly threatened to attack America and its allies. This is a dubious line of argument, however, because the question is: what has changed? Iraq has not really changed policy for four years. What is the basis for arguing that now an attack is imminent? There isn't one. Fourth, and finally, Iraq is in violation of numerous U.N. resolutions, in violation of the Gulf War cease-fire, in violation of its treaty obligations under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and in violation of various international rules on human rights and so forth. All true. But what is the basis for the U.S. arrogating to itself the responsibility for prosecuting these violations? International law will quickly come to a halt if it is understood that all nations can act as freelance prosecutors of violations anywhere on earth. Even the Gulf War ceasefire violations do not rise to the level of justification for war, because the authority for combat in the Gulf War came from the U.N., a body which has shown no inclination to declare such violations to be material, much less to authorize new hostilities.

Now, most conservatives wouldn't mind to see the back of the U.N. Neither would I. But Richard Holbrooke is right that the U.N. was created to promote a world conducive to American interests and values. If we are going to give up on the U.N., what are we installing in its place? The Administration's document covering these matters talks about cooperation among the Great Powers. That was the idea behind the U.N. as well. What will be different this time?

It looks like what will be different this time is: the new architecture will be unabashedly centered in America. NATO is the model, not the U.N. The emerging world order is more properly termed a "free world order" - a security architecture for largely free countries with strong ties of interest, values and culture, and a handful of not-terribly-free allies of convenience. Collectively, we the free world will be asserting our right - and, by implication, accepting our responsibility - not only to protect our collective interests, but also to maintain order and promote freedom in the rest of the world, and to do so by force when necessary.

That's a tall order. No taller than the U.N. charter, of course, but there will be no figleaf of global consensus about the new architecture. America has, since WWII, been the lynchpin of the international system; where we have abdicated responsibility, order has broken down. But we have served as such more quietly in the past. Will we be able to hold together our alliances and friendships with, for example, France, Canada, Mexico, Russia and Japan under this new system? Will NATO prove to be a good model for a global security architecture, or an artifact of the Soviet threat that cannot even be generalized to post-Cold-War Europe, much less to the whole world?

I fear, primarily, that this Administration, with its admirable instincts for what is right and what is necessary, has too few bold architects. It is a problem that we have a Colin Powell and not a George Marshall at State. We need not a cautious product of the existing system but a bold innovator, skilled at diplomacy but aware that a new architecture is necessary, and eager to build it. We need a man more like the Democrat Richard Holbrooke - or, for that matter, the Republican George Shultz.

That was a long Second. Third and finally, I pray as we enter upon this fateful enterprise that are hopes are more nearly in tune with the mind of G-d than our fears. Those bent on harm for harm's sake are the most difficult of enemies to thwart. If Saddam Hussein, Sheik Nasrullah, Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khamenei, or the rest of the gang of evildoers wish to burn half of Israel, I fear they will succeed. My hope, on the other hand, rests on all people's desire for peace and freedom - on the unwillingness of the Iraqi people to sacrifice themselves to satisfy a tyrant's megalomania. We shall soon find out which way the mind of G-d is inclined.

Enjoy the last night of Hanukkah. In the dawn's early light of Sunday morning, the world will be different, one way or the other.
posted by Noah at 3:26 PM

 
I haven't been paying much attention to the revival of the Central Park Jogger case, though I probably should be. But John Podhoretz has, and he's got a point. These guys are bad men. They should be in jail. It looks like there's a good chance they shouldn't be in jail for rape. Sad thing is, at the time the race arsonists thought the way to defend these guys was the say that the jogger was making it up about being raped and beaten into a coma. And this new evidence - that another bad guy may well have done the brutal raping and beating, while the gents who were convicted were busy terrorizing other innocents in the park - will be understood as vindication for the slanderers.

Depressing.
posted by Noah at 2:14 PM

 
My apologies for being so out of it lately. Very busy at work.

Just got around to reading last month's First Things. Two interesting bits therein:

First, an article about the nature and history of marriage, by John Witte Jr. It was very clarifying to me. One thing it clarified is: my attitudes towards the nature of marriage are very congruent with Protestant attitudes historically (even though - or perhaps because - I'm Jewish). As Witte outlines, the big difference between Protestant and Catholic understandings of marriage is that Catholicism privileges celibacy over marriage whereas Protestantism (excluding Anglicanism, which, in my view, is really a rather different animal), like Judaism, frowns upon celibacy and privileges marriage. In any event, the Protestant model is convenant-based; the parties to a marriage are the groom and bride but also the community, G-d, and the family stretching forward and backward in time. That sounds right to me, far more right than pure contractarianism, which posits that the bride and groom are the only parties to the marriage. Witte does a very good job of explaining how contractarian ideas about marriage were important in correcting abuses of the older Protestant and Catholic models of marriage, as well as how the excesses of the contractarian approach have resulted in much of the mess that marriage is in today. The emphasis he places on no-fault divorce as the "reform" that destroyed the public institution of marriage is entirely proper, in my view, but he adds a number of nuances that I would never have thought of (particularly his discussion about the difference between divorce and annulment, and their collapse in the contractarian understanding of marriage). It's a very good article, strongly recommended, and I expect I'll be returning to its themes as I return, repeatedly, to the topic of marriage and how it can be regenerated.

Second, an "exchange" about Justice Scalia's famous comments on the death penalty, Catholic teaching, and judges, which were published in First Things some months ago. Scalia's original point can by summarized as follows: (a) the death penalty is affirming of life because some crimes can only be justly compensated for by the execution of the guilty; (b) this has, historically, been Church teaching; (c) if the Church teaches that retribution is not a justification for the death-penalty, then it is being false to its own history; (d) if the Church were to forbid Catholics from being involved in "the machinery of death" then Catholic judges (at least in the United States) would be morally bound to resign their positions. The critical responses come in various flavors; the most interesting is the argument, Stephen Long at the University of St. Thomas, that retribution - the restoration of the moral order through punishment - is a plausible justification for punishment only if the society manifests moral values at the core of its public institutions. Long specifically argues that the legal status of abortion means that our public order is fundamentally immoral; therefore, the death-penalty cannot restore the moral order that our public institutions are obliged to defend, and therefore, in our society specifically, retribution is not a justification for the death-penalty, and we fall back on the prudential debate which is the heart of the Church's recent teachings on the topic.

This is an interesting argument. Scalia's rejoinder - that the public order is never all moral or all immoral; retribution therefore is legitimate in all societies or in none - is problematic on its face. Long raises the example of Nero. One might have as easily raised the problem of Hitler, or, for that matter, 1920s Mississippi. If the death penalty is applied most vigorously against religious dissidents, does it still uphold the moral order in any one? When it is applied to innocent Jews and not to their murderers? When it is applied to suspected black rapists but not the white mobs who murder them? Where one draws the line is an interesting and difficult question, but surely the line is somewhere. Surely a state may be thoroughly corrupted by evil and yet legitimate; and surely, in that case, its application of penalties, capital or not, does not uphold any kind of moral order. Whether legalized abortion is such a corruption is a matter for debate - but, plausibly, for debate between the Church and non-Catholics, not within the Church, because the Church has settled on the position that abortion is a profound evil comparable to murder, from which perspective our state must be deeply and profoundly corrupt indeed.

But Long exposes subtler problems with Scalia's argument which apply even if the public order is not profoundly corrupted. Perhaps if we back up a bit, and ask what retribution means, we'll see why. Retribution can be understood as either expiation or satisfaction. Expiation can be either for the community or the criminal. Either the criminal is cleansed of the consequences of his act upon his soul by suffering punishment, or the community makes expiation for its failure to prevent the crime by punishing the criminal. In either case, the focus is on the guilty and on washing away the guilt. If the basis of retribution is satisfaction, then the focus is on the wronged. Again, the wronged can be either the community - the criminal violated the peace - or the victim of the crime - the criminal violated his rights. Rather than expiating guilt, retribution satisfied the wronged party that "justice has been done" and the moral order restored.

There is more than a bit of tension between these two perspectives. Let's ignore the criminal and the victim for a moment and focus entirely on the community. A community that did not understand itself to be morally responsible for protecting its members from harm could nonetheless have a concept of retributive justice, but only on the satisfaction, not the expiation model. Indeed, this is the pagan or secular model of retribution, which cannot have had a concept of divine sanction underpinning its understanding of justice. It is also, arguably, the understanding of most contemporaries who favor the death penalty. They do not feel guilty for having (collectively) allowed the crime to happen (nor are they concerned for the soul of the criminal). Rather, they are offended at the violation of the victim's rights and/or public order, and demand satisfaction. This understanding of retribution is, pragmatically, the civilized alternative to a culture of vengeance. In a vengeance culture, justice is privatized. Every individual, if his sense of justice is offended, pursues the offender to punish him. In a secular account of retribution, this vengeance is foregone in exchange for an agreement to rely upon the community (and the state it authors) to provide satisfaction - not according to the feelings of individual victims but according to universally accepted norms of justice. One pragmatic argument in favor of the death penalty is that, in fact, if satisfaction is not generally provided, then society will degenerate into privatizing justice, and return to a culture of vengeance - a vigilante culture.

I think that's all fairly reasonable, but it's not particularly congruent with the concept of expiation, nor does is it particularly congruent with Christian ethics as I understand them (and again, I'm not a Christian). G-d, presumably, does not need satisfaction, though He may demand expiation of the guilty. (Indeed, He may demand that expiation in blood.) If the state stands in for G-d in executing justice (which is basically Scalia's understanding of the traditional Church perspective on secular justice), then the state cannot be demanding satisfaction. But if the state is standing in for G-d, then the state cannot be making expiation, but must be demanding it of the offender. It's a subtle distinction I'm making, between society saying "the only way we can be satisfied is if you die for what you did" and "the only way you can atone for what you did is by your death." But I suspect that the former, and not the latter, is the primary psychology behind the contemporary supporters of the death penalty.

Scalia doesn't particularly reckon with the following sentense from Cardinal Dulles: "In our society, moreover, the death penalty is often seen as an instrument of popular vindictiveness and retaliation rather than of divine justice, since the transcendent order of justice is not generally recognized." One could rephrase that to be more kind to the public while making the same point: the public expresses an entirely moral but entirely earthly understanding of retributive justice, one based on satisfaction rather than expiation and on the substitution of public retribution for private vengeance rather than the transcending of an ethic of vengeance by an ethic of love. There is an entirely valid G-d-centered notion of retribution, in this view, but it is not available to a society that rejects its ethical basis. The Church could legitimately argue that even a noble pagan ethos must be restrained when it lays claim to the power over life and death. That would suit more with the radicalism of the Christian witness than with the conservative political ends to which it is sometimes yoked.
posted by Noah at 1:45 PM

 
David Frum has an excellent appreciation of Elliot Abrams in his diary today. Check it out. Abrams is a personal foreign-policy hero, an admirable man who made an enormous difference to the lives of millions in this hemisphere, and for his pains was called a criminal. He'd be an enormous asset to the Near East desk. I'd like it even better if he were cleaning out the Aegean stables at State.

As for democratizing the Middle East, I'm long-term optimistic (because I believe in human freedom) but pessimistic short-term. As I've argued many times, the precondition for democratization is true nationalism and a precondition for true nationalism is a patriotic elite. That elite is largely nonexistent in the Middle East. It exists in the Turkish officer corps. I believe it exists in Iran. I have hopes, longer-term, for Algeria and Egypt. That's about it. I don't believe Islam is incompatible with democracy and freedom; the same arguments used to be made about Catholicism. I do believe that Islam as currently practiced in the Arab world is self-consciously the enemy of democracy, and this is rather different from the situation in Chile or South Korea in the 1980s, or in Spain or Taiwan in the 1970s. Nonetheless: much luck to him. Let's see if he makes Michael Ledeen a little happier on Iran.
posted by Noah at 4:01 PM

 
Well, I've been making the rounds, and it looks like the consensus is: Kerry is probably the strongest candidate in the race except that everyone who meets him loathes him immediately. Or, at least, everyone in the press does, blogosphere included. I seem to be the exception here, but of course I haven't met the guy. I mean, I don't like him, but I don't understand why everyone hates him.

The reasons they claim to hate him are the reasons people hated Al Gore. He's arrogant. He's got a fantastically inflated sense of his own importance. He maneuvers for political advantage like any other pol but acts like such maneuvering is beneath him. He's not great at passing legislation. All these things, though, are true of John McCain as well, who is probably the most popular politician with the Washington press corps since John F. Kennedy. Is the difference only that McCain is fun? That he's self-deprecating? That he's a self-styled "maverick" who bucks his party? I happen to like McCain, but when you dig down under his "maverick" image, this bucking-the-party business is fairly new (mostly post-2000) and (with the exception of Campaign Finance Reform) mostly futile.

I am not in tune with Kerry's ideological bent, and I am not particularly impressed with his achievements as a legislator. But the personality flaws attested to by the press pale before those of, say, Johnson, Nixon, Clinton and Gore. He does not seem like a raging maniac. His ego doesn't seem especially bigger than your average pol. He's less of a robot than Gore, and less of a trimmer. Again: I wouldn't vote for him, but why does everyone hate him so? I admit, I don't get it.


posted by Noah at 8:14 PM

 
I'm kind of surprised it's taken until now for terrorists to seriously try to shoot down civilian aircraft with SAMs. The weapons are cheap, they are readily available, you kill lots and lots of people if you hit your target, you terrify huge numbers even if you don't, and the economic damage to the enemy's economy is potentially huge. For a country like Kenya or Indonesia, a couple of successful terrorist attacks on aircraft could end their tourist industry. That's a triple win from al Qaeda's perspective: you kill infidels, you destroy an industry you think is evil, and you destabilize the economy of a largely Muslim country, increasing the recruitment pool and making it a safer place to base operations.

And it's not clear what we can do to prevent such attacks. Airport security is irrelevant if the bad guys can shoot the plane out of the sky. Shut down the international arms trade? A bit late, I think, and unlikely to succeed. Working with local law enforcement is likely to be as effective as local law enforcement is. Remember, we're talking about 3rd world countries where the police's main occupations are extortion and racketeering. You could probably avoid 95% of attacks by simply not flying to dubious places. But that means massive economic damage to the countries and regions in question, and no small economic impact to us. What else? Is it time to equip civilian airlines with anti-missile defenses and countermeasures?

We're going to start asking these questions. There's two perspectives on the terror war, the ideological dimension and the security dimension. On the former, we're at war with a bunch of Nazi thugs who want to take over the Muslim world or at least kill as many infidels as they can while trying. To win the war: kill the thugs, cut off their sources of support, and dry up the swamps of repression and stagnation in which they breed. But on the second perspective - the one taken by Brink Lindsey in his "new barbarians" essays at NRO - what we're dealing with is a technological problem. The balance of power has tipped towards the barbarians. We need free movement of people and goods and ideas to sustain the wealth of our civilization. But that same movement, coupled with new, powerful weapons that can be wielded easily by individuals or small groups, makes our civilization extremely vulnerable to terror. Today it's al Qaeda, but tomorrow it could be Hizballah, or even a home-grown non-Islamic group - an anti-globalization version of the Weathermen, for example. From the security perspective, a good offense is an insufficient defense. And so, inevitably, we're going to be talking more and more about military defenses for civilian targets: airplanes, skyscrapers, etc. We're all going to get used to soldiers on our streets. And gunners outside our windows.
posted by Noah at 5:52 PM

 
David Frum is unimpressed with John Kerry. I read the same Klein piece he did; I didn't come away feeling like the author couldn't stomach Kerry. Mind you, I didn't come away convinced he liked the guy, but look, the guy's unlikeable. It's possible to stomach, even admire, people you don't like.

I think Kerry is a pompous ass who honestly believes what he says. He's not Bill Clinton - a man with no soul and a bottomless need for approval, but with an excellent grasp of the American psyche and of politics as the art of the possible. Clinton appeared to have restored Democratic fortunes through deft tactical maneuvering and the force of his personality, but it turns out it was all about him; the party didn't fundamentally change at all. He's not Al Gore - a man who destroyed himself trying to live up to his father's dreams and demands, who understands himself and his country not at all, and has shown absolutely appalling character flaws every time he has been in a position not merely to advise but to lead. Gore comes close to being the personification of the self-destruction of the Democratic Party. And, with respect to Frum, he's not Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale. The Democrats he resembles most (to me) are Bill Bradley, Jimmy Carter and Adlai Stevenson. These were thoughtful, introspective men, with a profound sense of their own destiny and righteousness but who were fundamentally secure in themselves and fundamentally honest. They didn't take ideological dictation and they resisted trimming when their principles were unpopular. They may have been - they often were - wrong, but they were honorable opponents.

They were also politically inept, cold, overly intellectual, and were repeatedly mugged when reality failed to conform to their preconceptions. They all would rather be right than President, and they were all over-sure of their own rightness and rejecting of outside input. They were, fundamentally, failures, and I expect Kerry will fail as well. I wouldn't vote for him. But I don't think Frum is right that he is running on the "we wuz robbed" platform, nor that he is running as a "Wahhabi Democrat." Indeed, it's a peculiar charge for a principled conservative to throw; what would Frum say about such a characterization of Bush, who ran on a platform that was pretty faithful to conservative shibboleths?

I think there are only two candidates in the race who are certain to run entirely negative campaigns of this type: Gore and Daschle. Neither of them knows how to do anything else. Dean is running as Bruce Babbitt, the goo-goo candidate. Edwards, I have predicted before, will not run; he doesn't want to lose, which he would, and he has plenty of time to run in the future. If he ran, he'd be running as Al Gore circa 1988: the token Southerner who is too young and inexperienced to win. The prospect of a Davis campaign is too humorous to contemplate. I can't think of a good Democratic precedent for someone so absolutely loathed attempting the Presidency. The obvious precedent in American history is Nixon. Scaryyyyy. Gephardt has the potential to carve out Scoop Jackson territory if he keeps tacking right on the war. Remember, Scoop was an unreconstructed New Dealer on economic matters, just like Gephardt, but a muscular internationalist and anti-Communist abroad. Gephardt has about as much chance of winning the nod in 2004 as Jackson did in 1976. But if he ran a strong pro-war race in the primaries, that would be clarifying - if nothing else, it would force Kerry to sharpen his own thinking on the subject. Who else is in? Dodd? Not bloody likely. Bayh? Not this year; he's another one who wants to win, and has time. I guess there's still Lieberman. People think Lieberman is the Scoop Jackson candidate, but I don't buy it. After his performance in 2000, I really don't know how Lieberman runs convincingly. If he runs against affirmative action, for school choice, for a faith-positive social policy, and for the war, he won't get a single primary vote. If he runs as a domestic interest-group candidate but on a strong pro-war platform, I hate to say it, but his support of the war will look like a "Jewish thing" and will hurt the cause of the war among Democrats. Lieberman's destiny is to be a Senator. He is in no position to change his party, and if he prostitutes himself to win the support of interest groups who don't trust him, he'll have turned into Al Gore.

When you look at the lineup, it becomes clear why Kerry looks like the man to beat. He and Gephardt are the only strong candidates who do not have to run a campaign consisting entirely of resentment, and Gephardt is a too-familiar face with a history of losing and with instincts that put him at odds with the party's liberal donor base. We'll see on the stump whether Kerry actually stands for anything or whether, like Joe Lieberman, he throws anything innovative he believes overboard in obeisance to the party's interest groups. Bill Bradley in 2000 ran on a health-care proposal that was a lot more interesting and promising than anything else the Democrats have cooked up, and that Republicans could probably have compromised with to solve some the problem of the uninsured. If Kerry does something like that - on health care, or on education, or on CO2 emissions - he'll have done the Democrats a real service. And even if he loses (as I expect he will), he'll have done a service to the country. If he runs a purely negative campaign, such as the Democrats ran in 2000 and 2002, he'll have to bear part of the blame for their continuing slide into oblivion.

I'm going to make a more specific prediction. John McCain still hates the Bush Administration and he is genuinely friendly with John Kerry. If Kerry breaks with Democratic orthodoxy enough to propose real solutions to a couple of serious domestic problems, and if he runs a pro-military, muscular campaign on foreign policy terms that nonetheless stresses greater multilateralism and emphasis on nation-building - basically, a Peter Beinart foreign policy brief - he will get McCain's explicit support. How strongly McCain supports Kerry in his Presidential bid should be an index to how well he is likely to do, both in the primaries and in the general election. There are still enough McCainiacs out there that his support is worth a modest boost in electoral prospects. And 2004 is his last chance to use that rapidly waning influence. We'll see if this prediction is any better than my previous track record, which is pretty abysmal.
posted by Noah at 10:59 AM